"The Democrats in Congress read the same polls we do. They know that the majority of the people want them to take control in Iraq, want this war to end.", from Thomas Ricks on Endless War
The majority of the people indeed clearly want this war to end. It's the other part, Congress taking control of anything, least of all a war, that seems problematic in most people's minds. And that is the problem. The clear majority of us know the direction we want to go with this war, but unfortunately we also believe that the only possible way to get there is for some President to lead us there.
This is not a constitutional problem. The Constitution is quite clear that the control of wars and military forces is a Congressional responsibility, with the President as Commander-in-Chief acting merely to execute the will of Congress.
In our present situation, hip deep in the big muddy of a war that most of us can see is pointless at best, but only the captain seems blind to the danger and wants to push on, it sure would be handy if we actually lived by the Constitution, and didn't imagine that we have to listen to the fool. But we haven't lived by what the Constitution says about the respective roles of Congress and the Presidency for at least 60 years. This unwritten constitution by which Congress is a merely advisory and admonitory sounding board of public opinion, and not where the buck stops, is so ingrained in the mind of the public in general, and our political class in particular, that to attempt to revert to what the actual written Constitution demands, would seem revolutionary.
The Congressional Dems right now think that, in holding votes that demonstrate popular majorities for ending the war, they have done the most a Congress can do in opposition to a President in wartime. A reasonable President would fear the consequences of defying the will of the people as expressed by their representatives, and make some accommodation with Congress. Not this Congress, and not any other Congress until we overthrow this unwritten constitution that has us by the throat, will ever accept the idea that, in those cases when the President is not reasonable, and does not accede to public opinion, they have other options, other duties, besides holding votes that do nothing beyond serving notice of the state of public opinion.
By the conventional wisdom that follows from this unwritten constitution, all that Congress can do at this point is to await the next Presidential election, in expectation that the incumbent's defiance of the public will as they have expressed it in their votes, will insure the election of a new captain, who will turn around the direction of this war, and get us out of the big muddy. The current President is the God Who Failed, but the next President will come to rescue us on his white horse. I don't have a lot of confidence in this plan. Hope is not a plan. If we refuse to take back public accountability for this war, and war-making in general, by returning the responsbility for running our country's wars to Congress, and instead rely on a "good emperor" to be elected next time out, and for him to do the right thing for us, that responsibility that we wrongly leave in the private hands of the President, will force that next President to keep us in the war in order to protect his own and his party's political position. There will be terrorist attacks in our future. If our plan for dealing with such attacks, and all threats to the national security, is to trust to a Man on a White Horse to keep us safe, rather than to admit to each other publicly that security is a cost-benefit trade-off, and can never be absolute because the cost would be too high, then no President will ever be able to do anything but pay any cost that demagogues can even conjure an appearance that it makes us more safe. No President will ever leave Iraq, for fear that any subsequent terrorist attack will somehow be connectable to some Iraqi who might somehow have been prevented from launching his attack had we not cut and run from Iraq.
The Congressional Dems aren't failing to push the advantage of majority that the last elections gave them because they are somehow peculiarly cowardly or feckless. They are simply following the near-universally agreed on logic of our unwritten constitution. They do not feel that they can go out on a limb and oppose even so currently unpopular a President to assert even a position on Iraq that polls very well right now. They are very properly looking beyond the polls as they are today, and to what will happen in the future after the next terrorist attack if they now "lose Iraq" without the cover of that policy being bipartisan. And the Republicans are fixed in their support for continuing this war, not out of some blind loyalty to Bush (who is the God Who has Failed them a whole lot more acutely in their minds than he has failed the country), but precisely because they understand the political necessity of denying the Dems that bipartisan cover for ending this fiasco.
Bush and the Congressional Republicans, or even the Congressional Democrats, however great their particular failings, are not the real problem. The real problem is that our whole political culture has embraced an unwritten consitution that inverts the true roles of the Congress and the President. We don't just need to end the misrule of this President, we need to end the Presidency in the mutated and malignant form it has assumed these past 60 years.