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The American people have rejected the war and voiced their disapproval of the president's management of it. But what exactly can Democrats do? They've already labeled the war a tragic mistake, and some of them have called for a withdrawal of U.S. forces. Moreover, the war has cost the job of an unpopular Defense secretary.

Congress could pass nonbinding resolutions or even try to fashion legislation forbidding future U.S. military involvement in the fighting. As a last resort, Congress could use the power of the purse to cut off funds, effectively starving the war effort.

For Democrats swept into the majority by a wave of public dissatisfaction with the Iraq war, it's worth remembering that their predecessors tried all of those tactics and more during the Vietnam War. The ultimate result was a 30-year vulnerability to being called "weak on defense" and the numbing loss of four of the next five presidential elections.

"There is a cautionary lesson for today's Democrats in the early 1970s, when their party generally sided with the public in thinking that the Vietnam War was botched beyond repair and the United States needed to get out," said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank associated with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. As a result of Democrats' perceived excesses and close association with anti-war protests, he said, the party got a reputation for being averse to any use of force and too quick to blame America first for international problems.

"That reputation put Democrats in the political doghouse for three decades," Marshall said. "So I think those who are mindful of history will shy away from trying to take over Iraqi policy by, for instance, cutting off funding for the war. The fact is, you really can't conduct U.S. foreign policy from the House of Representatives. It's folly to even try."

Cooperation or Confrontation

With an electoral triumph that President Bush himself termed a "thumping," and with the surprise resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on November 8, Democrats are riding higher than at any time in more than a decade. Yet they confront a situation not unlike the one Republicans faced after the Newt Gingrich-led Republican revolution of 1994. Accustomed to the role of backbenchers, they are now in possession of newfound power and authority -- and political peril.

If Democrats misread their mandate or overreach in launching investigations of the Bush administration's past errors, they could go the way of the House Republicans after the botched shutdown of the federal government in 1995: paving the way for a reversal in the next year's presidential election. Only now, in a time of war, the stakes are far greater.

"To be honest, I am concerned that Democrats could overreach [in terms of investigations of past mistakes in Iraq] -- because we will have time to go back and get a more accurate record for history and posterity. We don't have much time to save ourselves and Iraq, and pull our chestnuts out of the fire," said Sen. Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on, and possible future chairman of, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, speaking with reporters on November 8.

With Rumsfeld's resignation as a sign of the administration's openness to a new course, "I think there is a bipartisan way forward in Iraq," Biden said. "The Iraq Study Group [chaired by former Republican Secretary of State James Baker and former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton] is the most likely way to build that bipartisan consensus and give the Bush administration cover or political room to make radical changes. At least, that's what I hope will happen."

With the Democratic caucus split over how hard and fast to press for a withdrawal of U.S. troops, many experts believe that the greatest challenge for the party will be balancing its competing impulses. MoveOn.org, a liberal Democratic grassroots organization that raised $27 million for candidates in the recent election and mounted an intense voter-turnout campaign, is pressing for a timetable for a rapid withdrawal. Many of the newly elected Democratic lawmakers, however, are centrists who were recruited to appeal to independent voters in swing districts, and they may fear a precipitous withdrawal.

The Democratic leadership, meanwhile, is pulled between the conflicting desires to shape a constructive course correction in Iraq and to hold the Bush administration accountable for mistakes.

Michael O'Hanlon, a national security expert at the Brookings Institution, said, "There are three basic approaches the Democrats can now take with Iraq, the first being a 'nuclear option' that essentially begins cutting funding to force Bush to start troop withdrawals, which would be bad policy and risk having the Democrats labeled as the party that lost Iraq."

The second option would have Democrats simply standing back and using oversight hearings and the command of the legislative agenda to underscore how badly the administration has botched Iraq, he said, ensuring that the Republicans own the issue in 2008.

"The third option, which I support, would be for [presumptive House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi to reach out and work with the Bush administration in a sort of 'good-cop, bad-cop' dynamic that uses the Democrats' threat of an immediate troop withdrawal to pressure the Iraqis to make the tough decisions on reconciliation, federalization, and de-Baathification," O'Hanlon said. "In that scenario, the Democrats and Bush would probably need to agree to put the debate about how we got to this point in Iraq behind them for some months."

Starving the War

In this age of what some scholars have termed the "imperial presidency," it's difficult to imagine the degree to which congressional Democrats once wrestled with the Nixon administration for control of the war effort in the latter stages of Vietnam. Remorseful about the vote that green-lighted the buildup, the Senate in June 1970 simply repealed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which in 1964 had cleared the way for a large deployment of ground troops, and the next year passed a nonbinding resolution urging the removal of all troops from Vietnam by the end of 1971.

When those measures failed to end U.S. involvement, Congress passed the Case-Church Amendment by veto-proof majorities in June 1973, forbidding further military involvement in Southeast Asia effective the following month.

In 1974, lawmakers went even further by closing the funding spigot, appropriating only $700 million for South Vietnam and vastly underfinancing South Vietnamese military forces. The waning of U.S. support was not lost on Hanoi. In March of the next year, North Vietnam invaded the South with 20 divisions. Within six weeks, helicopters evacuated the last Americans in Vietnam from the roof of the surrounded U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

Someone who fought in Vietnam and remembers that period was Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., one of the most vocal critics of the Iraq war and the incoming chairman of the powerful House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. Far from cutting funding for the war or the troops fighting it, he points out, Congress has added tens of billions of dollars to defense appropriations in recent years over what the administration requested.

"Even in Vietnam, Congress didn't cut funds until almost all of our troops were out -- but I don't think you can use the appropriations process that way. You can't use appropriations to keep troops from having what they need," said Murtha, a longtime Marine Corps officer, speaking recently to reporters. As part of their blueprint, "New Direction for America," the Democrats call for increased investments for equipment, protective gear, and training to address a readiness crisis in the U.S. military.

"But the $8 billion that we're spending in Iraq each month has to be reduced, and the only way to do that is to redeploy our troops," Murtha contended. "We simply cannot sustain a deployment like this, with this level of casualties, when there's no progress, and the American public is against it. President Bush is not immune to public opinion, and if he wants to leave a legacy, he'll have to listen to the 60 percent of Americans who think Iraq was a mistake."

Aggressive Oversight

House Democrats have made no secret of their intense frustration with the Republican-controlled Congress's lack of aggressive oversight of the Iraq war. In a June 9 letter, Ike Skelton, D-Mo., who is now the incoming chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, asked the Republican leadership to re-establish the subcommittee on oversight and investigations, which the GOP abolished when it took control of Congress in 1995.

Skelton plans to resurrect the subcommittee, partly to launch investigations on Iraq. Targets will likely include suspected administration manipulation of intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein's connections to Al Qaeda, the well-documented lack of planning for an extended U.S. occupation, and possible contracting abuses in Iraq by well-connected companies such as Halliburton and its subsidiaries.

"The Congress in recent years has not asked the tough questions or held the Bush administration to account, and my primary effort will be to have the full committee look comprehensively at Iraq," said Skelton, speaking to reporters on November 8.

Referring to Rumsfeld's resignation and Bush's announcement that he will nominate former CIA Director Robert Gates as Defense secretary, Skelton said, "What I hope will happen is that the new secretary will have an open ear to members of Congress, and hear our suggestions, rather than shove them back at us. If he will level with us, hear us out, and answer our tough questions, then I think we'll be miles ahead of where we are now."

Many experts believe that Rumsfeld's departure and the Baker-Hamilton group's recommendations may provide a brief window of opportunity for policy makers to reach a bipartisan deal on the way forward in Iraq. Such a deal might include a renewed emphasis on training and equipping Iraqi security forces on an accelerated timeline, as well as benchmarks for U.S. troop withdrawals beginning next year (though probably not hard timelines that the Bush administration continues to oppose).

James Phillips is a national security expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "House Democrats could prove a catalyst for change in Iraq if they are serious about reaching a bipartisan consensus. If they are determined to focus on a series of highly politicized hearings on the decision to go into Iraq or the original lack of planning, however, it will be very difficult to fashion a bipartisan plan on terms acceptable to Senate Republicans and the White House," he said. "At the end of the day, the president and commander-in-chief is the dominant actor in defense and foreign affairs, and Bush remains determined not to leave Iraq until that government can stand on its own."

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