News bulletin: Signs of life detected in Congress. A species showing both a spine and a will is emerging.

No longer, it seems, will lawmakers simply sit idly in deference to President Bush, the commander in chief and self-proclaimed decision maker when it comes to the Iraq war. That’s a modest improvement in the presidential vernacular from Bush’s assertion last year that he was “the Decider.” But it hardly appeases Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican.

“I would suggest respectfully to the President that he is not the sole decider. The decider is a shared and joint responsibility,” Specter said at a recent hearing last on Congress’ war powers.

So went a timely and useful lesson in the very Capitol where a resolution that’s now nearly four years old is what passes for authorization for what threatens to become an endless war.

One wonders how a fair and accurate summation of constitutional authority will go over in a White House where the secretary of defense was warning recently, in a tone reminiscent of the ugliness of the Nixon administration, that criticism of the war empowers the enemy. Or where Bush’s spokesman says the same thing, complete with references to Osama bin Laden.

A Congress that’s been reminded of its powers and responsibilities ought to do more than merely criticize the war, as did Monday’s Senate resolution that objects to the President’s plans to send 21,500 more troops. That’s an exercise for the less empowered. For Congress, the obligation should be to prepare to bring the troops home.

“The Constitution makes Congress a co-equal branch of government. It’s time we start acting like it,” says Sen. Russell Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat who supports legislation that eventually would stop the necessary funding for keeping U.S. forces in Iraq.

It would be difficult, surely, at least under the current political circumstances. But it would be an essential step toward declaring that this is a war that can’t remotely be won in the traditional sense, and toward acknowledging that Iraq is closer to an ungovernable country than it is to a breakthrough for Mideast democracy.

It’s up to Congress to convince a stubborn president that the best policy now is one that prepares for the day when other forces will have to assume what had been a U.S. responsibility of maintaining a semblance of order and security in a land of Shiite-Sunni chaos.

It’s time for Congress, where the Democrats are now the majority party, to hold the Bush administration accountable for the war and all its casualties, and to change course.



— The Times Union of Albany