Forward Observer: Days of Future Past

Congress this week steps up its own surge of efforts to grab back its war powers from the Executive Branch. Early tests of strength will come soon in both the House and Senate as Democrats and a thin line of Republicans try to figure out a way to wrest the steering wheel for the Iraq War away from President Bush without looking reckless or weak on defense.

House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha, D-Pa., thought he had figured out how to do this but has run into a backlash in his own party. Murtha's idea was to write in a series of conditions in the supplemental war funding bill providing the $93.4 billion Bush has requested for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One of Murtha's intended conditions was to forbid Bush from sending a fighting outfit to Iraq that has not had a year of duty at home between deployments. Another was to specify that no unit that was not fully equipped for battle could be deployed.

The ugly truth about the American military right now is that Bush has kept the Army and Marine Corps too small for too long to allow units to stay home for a year between deployments and still put additional boots on the ground under his surge strategy. Exacerbating that manpower problem is the fact that the nation's governors are in near rebellion over what they consider Bush's over-deployment of their National Guard units to Iraq.

As for getting all the soldiers and marines fully equipped before they leave their home bases, no can do.

The reason, as Murtha and others clued into the realities of today's near-broken military well know, is that for these past five years, units with orders to go to Iraq have been taking equipment from units staying home. This has created shortages that Bush could not possibly cure in time to execute his surge strategy of adding 21,500 troops to the American force in Iraq over the next several months.

So Murtha's stratagems would have indeed prevented Bush from executing his surge strategy. But a growing number of Democratic moderates are defecting from his proposal on the grounds that it would look like they were micromanaging the war.

So less severe restrictions are under discussion as the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee prepares to tinker with Bush's request for approximately $100 billion in extra money for the wars.

The Senate went through a Kabuki dance before the Presidents Day recess over a formal objection to Bush's surge. To the obvious embarrassment of the Democratic leadership, that other body could not come up with any non-binding resolution to protest the surge like the House did.

So the would-be Senate protesters of Bush's escalation will focus in coming days on repealing the 2002 congressional resolution that authorized Bush to invade Iraq in the first place. If past is prologue, as it usually is with such efforts, this will be like trying to put an egg back into a chicken.

Like the Iraq War of today, the Vietnam War became increasingly unpopular with the public as it dragged on and U.S. casualties mounted.

Yet the legislative record shows that the various war power resolutions the Senate passed had little impact on the presidential military actions in Vietnam.

Not until 1973, eight years after President Lyndon Johnson authorized U. S. troops to conduct offensive operations on April 6, 1965, did Congress muster the strength to vote against appropriating any more money to finance the war in Vietnam.

Still, the same engine that pushed Congress into forcing President Richard Nixon to change course on the Vietnam War is the same one pushing Congress into forcing Bush to change course on the Iraq War.

The engine is Congress feeling that its war powers have been usurped by the executive. History shows that once Congress starts up that engine, as it has now done for Iraq, the engine stalls but does not quit.

Murtha's forbearer as chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee was the late Rep. Joseph Addabbo, D-N.Y. In 1973, Addabbo used an appropriations bill to stop the Vietnam War, just as Murtha is trying to do now to change the course of the Iraq War.

"For too long, the Congress has bowed to the wishes of this and the previous administration on Indochina policies," Addabbo told his colleagues on the House floor on June 26, 1973. "And I believe the time has come for the Congress to say firmly -- and once and for all -- we are done with war making on behalf of dubious causes without the express consent of Congress."

Congress, in trying to reassert its war powers, will resemble a nervous nurse pulling a Band-Aid off one hair at a time rather boldly pulling it off all at once.

But the reassertion process has started, and, although it will be painful to watch, will not stop. The pace could well be determined by what the enemy does in Iraq rather than what the lawmakers do in Washington.

U.S. commanders have been reporting that the enemy is becoming more sophisticated in its tactics, noting how many U.S. helicopters have been shot down. This is what happened in Vietnam, too, as the enemy learned how to offset U.S. technical superiority with such simple tactics as riflemen lying on their backs and shooting a fusillade of bullets into the path of a U.S. chopper, often downing it.

Higher U.S. casualties in Iraq, as was the case in Vietnam, would intensify congressional efforts to change the course of the war. As Yogi Berra would put it, it's deja vu all over again.