Party Ain't Over Til Last Pooper Has Pooped

The party's over





The Democratic Party was given control of Congress in part because the nation had grown weary of a war without discernible progress or direction.





But the new majority then dithered and dickered and hemmed and hawed for four months. The dying of U.S. troops continued and President George W. Bush gave the nation nothing more than an escalation of the same old, failed policy, dressed up to go to town as a "surge."





Last week, however, U.S. Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., proposed that Congress repeal the authority it had given to President Bush in 2002 to invade Iraq.





THE initiative is a turning point on a couple of scores.





For one thing, it marks the turnabout of presidential candidate Clinton on an issue on which she was increasingly vulnerable among Democratic voters. Clinton, unlike her chief opponent for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., supported the decision to invade Iraq. Her support of the war made her a bit of a pariah among the anti-war wing of her party.





Some will view her support of revocation of war authorization as cynically political in service of the naked presidential ambitions that led her to establish residency in Chappaqua, Westchester County, in the first place. Perhaps such a case can be made.





But the turnabout also is plausibly in keeping with the nation's turn of mind about the war. The American people have come to recognize that not only were they sold a bill of goods to invade Iraq, but the mismanagement of both the war and occupation have made it impossible to extract anything of value from the adventure.





A politician changing her position in response to conditions and the changing sentiment of the public is not necessarily a bad thing.





And if a change of position sometimes can seem suspicious, it nonetheless is preferable to an unreasoned obstinance disguised as the virtue of steadfastness, as exhibited in continued support of more of the same by Bush and the likes of Sens. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., and John McCain, R-Ariz.





PRESIDENTIAL politics aside, the proposal to revoke the authority for war will put Congress four square onto the essential issue of continued American involvement.





Predicated on the assumption of an imminent threat posed by the production and stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction, the invasion of Iraq proved that war rationale to have been a mirage.





One could make a case that the original authorization was null and void the instant the declared cause was recognized to have been mistaken.





An Iraqi civil war was unanticipated and, therefore, pacification of such a conflict was never a war aim. By what right, then, does Bush make it a precondition of disengagement?





Our reading of the Constitution tells us he does not have an unchecked power to make up war aims as he goes. Such a power would be too great a grant of authority, especially when the original cause of war has turned out to be a mirage, if not an outright fraud perpetrated by the executive branch's abuse of intelligence.





At the very least, the power to modify war aims would seem to require the tacit consent of Congress. In that way, the Civil War for union morphed at Abraham Lincoln's initiative into the nation's war to free the slaves. Wars against Axis aggression in World War II became, at Frankiln Roosevelt's initiative, the nation's wars for unconditional surrender.





CLEARLY, the invasion of Iraq to counter a perceived threat of weapons of mass destruction never anticipated our need to settle an Iraqi civil war. There has been no tacit approval given for that new war aim by either Congress or the American people. Quite the contrary.





Still, it is another thing altogether to claim, as the Clinton-Byrd resolution must, that the power to force the end of a war by congressional declaration is inherent in the exclusive power to declare war.





It would seem an uncertain thing at best, suggesting a constitutional showdown would be in the offing over the respective boundaries of congressional and executive authority, if the measure were passed by Congress.





But last week, Republican congressmen to the left of their party's center tipped the balance considerably. A contingent of those Republican members of Congress served personal notice on the president that their patience is waning. Bush was told that real results will have to be evident by fall or he will begin to lose support within his own party on Capitol Hill. Those of us old enough to remember the Vietnam War have seen this movie before. Once a president loses his own party on the prosecution of a war, there is nowhere left for him to stand.




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