Making Bush listen to reason

THE RESOLUTIONS against President Bush's Iraq war policies offered by Senator Edward Kennedy and colleagues of both parties are expressions of the democratic will of the country.

The November election and recent polls leave no doubt that a large majority of Americans opposes Bush's war policy and a troop increase. Similarly, several senior generals, both serving and retired, have issued strong public criticisms of Bush's troop increase and his new emphasis on asking US forces to quell Iraq's sectarian warfare by attacking Shi'ite militias as well as Sunni Arab insurgents. The bipartisan Baker-Hamilton Commission unanimously endorsed a new approach.

But Bush has refused to heed calls for a change of course, and against the dispatch of an additional 21,000 troops to Iraq. It is this almost monarchical indifference to criticism that justifies the resolutions the Senate will be considering this week, even though their immediate effect is largely symbolic.

Kennedy was hardly indulging in hyperbole Sunday on "Meet the Press" when he said: "If we have a president that is going to effectively defy the American people, going to defy the generals, defy the majority of the Congress of the United States, Republicans and Democrats, then we, I think, have a responsibility to end the funding for the war."

The bill Kennedy introduced two weeks ago would not actually halt funding for the war. Rather it would oblige Bush to ask for congressional authorization of funds to pay for a troop increase "above the numbers existing as of January 9, 2007." The White House claims it already has the funds for the extra 21,000 troops, and those troops are likely to be deployed before any version of the Kennedy bill could be passed.

Nevertheless, the bill's "findings" offer a powerful brief for not expanding America's mission in Iraq and for curtailing Bush's conduct of an imperial presidency. Those findings rightly note that the grounds for the original 2002 congressional authorization of war in Iraq -- weapons of mass destruction, an unproved claim of Saddam Hussein's "operational relationship with Al Qaeda," and the dead dictator's defiance of United Nations resolutions -- no longer apply.

Above all, the bill correctly points out that the US mission in Iraq has changed utterly since the 2002 authorization vote. Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican who is co-sponsoring another Senate bill against escalation, cast a cold eye on that changed mission Sunday. "It is wrong to put American troops in the middle of a sectarian civil war," Hagel said. "Are we not to register our sense of where we are going in this country?"

Symbolic as their bills and resolutions may be, Hagel, Kennedy, and their colleagues are using their powers as legislators wisely by trying to turn the country away from an even worse disaster in Iraq.