page_title: Richard Lugar
section_title: Iraq War
hierarchical_section_title: Richard Lugar / Political positions / Iraq War
caption_attribution_description: English: Senator Richard Lugar with then-President Ronald Reagan
context_page_description: Richard Green Lugar was an American politician who served as a United States Senator from Indiana from 1977 to 2013. He was a member of the Republican Party.
  Born in Indianapolis, Lugar graduated from Denison University and the University of Oxford. He served on the Indianapolis Board of School Commissioners from 1964 to 1967 before he was elected to two terms as mayor of Indianapolis, serving from 1968 to 1976. During his tenure as mayor, Lugar served as the president of the National League of Cities in 1971 and gave the keynote address at the 1972 Republican National Convention.
  In 1974, Lugar ran his first campaign for the U.S. Senate. In the year's senate elections he lost to incumbent Democratic senator Birch Bayh. He ran again in 1976, defeating Democratic incumbent Vance Hartke. Lugar was reelected in 1982, 1988, 1994, 2000, and 2006. In 2012, Lugar was defeated by Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock in the Republican primary, ending his 36-year tenure in the U.S. Senate. Lugar ran for the Republican nomination for President of the United States in the 1996 primaries but lack of success led to his withdrawal early in the campaign.
context_section_description: On June 25, 2007, Lugar, who had been "a reliable vote for President Bush on the war", said that "Bush's Iraq strategy [is] not working and... the United States should downsize the military's role".
  Lugar's blunt assessment has been viewed as significant because it showed the growing impatience and dissatisfaction with President Bush's strategy in Iraq. After Lugar finished his remarks, Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D-IL), a sharp critic of the war, praised Lugar's "thoughtful, sincere and honest" speech, which Durbin said was in the "finest tradition of the U.S. Senate". Durbin urged his Senate colleagues to take a copy of Lugar's speech home over the Fourth of July break and study it before returning to work. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, in reaction to Lugar's speech: "When this war comes to an end, and it will come to an end, and the history books are written, and they will be written, I believe that Sen. Lugar's words yesterday could be remembered as a turning point in this intractable civil war in Iraq."
  Two days later, on June 27, 2007, Lugar said that Congressional measures aimed at curtailing U.S. military involvement in Iraq – including "so-called timetables, benchmarks" – have "no particular legal consequence", are "very partisan", and "will not work".
caption: Richard Lugar and then-President Ronald Reagan, July 1981
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