A Feb. 4 Style article about the Iraq war misspelled the last name of Jessica Tuchman Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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It is language that haunts her still.
"I said then it was giving the administration a blank check to use in perpetuity," Lee says. "If you read that resolution, it's very clear that it was the beginning of a march to war."
She voted against that resolution -- the only member of Congress to do so -- and then took the barbs.
"It was a very tough period," she says. "To call me unpatriotic was the lowest of the low," especially considering that her father, an Army lieutenant colonel, served for 25 years and saw duty in World War II and Korea.
Now, she says, people are eager to tell her she was right. But "it's not about feeling vindicated," she says.
"I want people to understand that this is a very dangerous foreign policy, the administration's foreign and military policy is very dangerous, that the notion of preemptive war is very dangerous and that we need to support more rational approaches to our foreign and military policy."
Lee, like Odom and many others, is calling for the war to end. They are strange bedfellows -- she, a progressive liberal; he, a usually hawkish conservative.
For months, Odom, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, has been pushing a "cut and run" policy. He even wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times in October headlined "How to Cut and Run," in which he wrote, "We must cut and run tactically in order to succeed strategically."
He advocates troop withdrawal coupled with a diplomatic engagement with Iraq's neighbors, especially Iran, with whom the United States actually has common interests, nukes notwithstanding.
Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, formerly the top U.S. military man in the Middle East, started where Odom started -- in opposition to the war. Zinni argued that going into Iraq would destabilize the region and distract from the fight against al-Qaeda.
For his opposition, he says he was accused by some fellow officers of having political motivations and was disinvited from attending meetings at the Joint Forces Command, where he'd been a regular as a senior mentor for more junior officers.
But he diverges from most early critics of the war, because he now is arguing that withdrawing from Iraq would destabilize the region. Instead, he says, a new strategic framework for the war is needed -- something far broader than the increase Bush has proposed, which Zinni calls a "half-step."
