Bush's undemocratic escalation.

There's a proverb that says, "Bad beginnings lead to bad endings." U.S. troops are discovering the truth of that every day in Baghdad, Anbar province, and elsewhere throughout that country.

The American people have absorbed the truth of that proverb, as well. A majority wants U.S. troops out of there within the year. On November 7, voters drove that point home, booting Republicans from power. In a December 15 CNN poll, only 11 percent said they wanted to send more troops in.

The soldiers themselves have come to the same conclusion. A February 2006 Zogby poll revealed that 72 percent of them believed that all U.S. troops should leave Iraq within a year's time.

And no wonder.

Bush's war has cost the lives of more than 3,000 U.S. troops and anywhere from 52,000 Iraqi civilians to more than ten times that number. A figure for wounded Iraqis is hard to come by. For U.S. soldiers, that number exceeds 22,000.

The financial toll is also exorbitant. We are spending $2 billion a week on this horror, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates that it will end up costing the United States $3 trillion.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice blithely says it's all "worth the investment."

Her boss is too insulated or too stubborn or too macho or too deluded to face reality and accept the fig leaf that James Baker offered him so he--and our troops--could get out of there.

"This business about a graceful exit just simply has no realism to it whatsoever," Bush said.

He's absolutely right about that.

There is no exit marked "graceful." The only exits from Iraq are marked "clumsy," "embarrassing," "humiliating," "bloody," "bloodier," and "bloodiest."

But somehow Bush thinks he can still be victorious in Iraq. Even Henry Kissinger doesn't believe that anymore. And the commanders, including the Joint Chiefs, advised Bush against sending more troops.

Bush responded by scolding them and then changing commanders. After a classified Pentagon briefing in December, General James Conway described Bush's message the following way: "What I want to hear from you is how we're going to win, not how we're going to leave."

The new U.S. military strategy seems to be "surge and train."

But neither has any hope of success.

As University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole notes, "The U.S. put an extra 15,000 men into Baghdad this past summer, aiming to crush the guerrillas and stop the violence in the capital, and the number of attacks actually increased." The reason: The U.S. has lost hearts and minds. "They hate us, folks. They don't want us there," Cole says on his blog, "Informed Comment." Here's a sobering statistic: More than 60 percent of Iraqis polled say it's justifiable to kill U.S. soldiers. It's hard to win that way.

"The American Army isn't large enough to secure Baghdad," Bush's former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said in December.

U.S. training of Iraqi troops also holds no promise. The latest evidence of this comes in a December 23 Los Angeles Times article by Molly Hennessy-Fiske, who writes that "75 percent of Iraqi soldiers don't show up for duty." She quotes one of the trainers, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Mark Winn, as saying: "We're still at the point where if we're not there, trash accumulates, nobody's shaving or wearing uniforms, and we're back where we started." Winn told her it would take more than a year to "break their bad habits." One of those bad habits is working with the militias. Another trainer told Hennessy-Fiske that an Iraqi commander they were working with "was having militia leaders over for meetings in his office." That speaks to the fundamental problem with the training strategy. Many, if not most, of the Iraqis seem to have a greater loyalty to their own sects and militias than they do to the Iraqi army.

Never mind, says Bush, as he prepares to send more troops in--or forces them to stay there overtime.

For the soldiers, the tour of duty must seem like a nightmare. With apologies to Tennyson, there are IEDs to the right of them and IEDs to the left of them. And still Bush issues the commands: "Forward!"

   Not tho' the soldier knew
   Someone had blunder'd
   Theirs not to make reply,
   Theirs not to reason why,
   Theirs but to do and die.

The founder of The Progressive, Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, took pains to insist upon the right of Congress to exercise its constitutional duties in wartime. As Article I enumerates them, those duties include not only the right to declare war but also "to make rules concerning captures on land and water" and "to raise and support" armies and navies, and "to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces."

The Republican Congress, along with many Democrats with their tongues hanging out, rolled over for Bush at the beginning of the war. For a while there, even after November's election, it looked like the leadership of the Democratic Party would heel again.

In December, Senator Harry Reid went on ABC's This Week to declare: "If the commanders on the ground said this is just for a short period of time, we'll go along with that." Reid, as head of the Democrats in the Senate, is supposed to represent the opposition, but on Iraq, he was providing no real opposition to the Bush course. His only proposal was to send an envoy to Iraq--as if that would solve anything.

But within a month, Reid came around. In a letter to President Bush, he and Nancy Pelosi said, in plain English, "We are well past the point of more troops for Iraq.... It is time to bring the war to a close."

They told Bush, "Surging forces is a strategy that you have already tried and that has already failed." They said a repeat of such a strategy would be a "serious mistake." As they pointed out, "More combat troops will only endanger more Americans and stretch our military to the breaking point for no strategic gain."

They didn't call for immediate withdrawal, however. In fact, they didn't call for withdrawal at all. Instead, they advocated a "phased redeployment of our forces in the next four to six months, while shifting the principal mission of our forces there from combat to training, logistics, force protection, and counter-terror." That's not the same as bringing the troops home.

But the Pelosi-Reid letter is a step in that direction. And Pelosi took another step a few days later when she hinted that the Democrats may finally consider using the power of the purse to curtail Bush's escalation.

The peace movement and progressive talk radio can take some credit for stiffening the Democrats' spines. In weekly rallies in small towns and big cities across the country, and in a steady drumbeat on the airwaves, peace advocates made sure the Democrats in Washington heard from them. It was no time to relax, no time to celebrate, no time to make nice.

Cindy Sheehan had the right idea. She dared to rain on the Democrats' inaugural parade. When the new Congress was being sworn in, and Pelosi, Reid, Representative Rahm Emanuel, and Senator Chuck Schumer were doing a victory lap, she showed up, with a few others, and chanted, "De-escalate, investigate, troops home now!" By protesting, she and her cohorts let the Democrats know that we in the peace movement will not tolerate backsliding or acquiescing.

It will take more of this kind of pressure on the Democrats to ensure they do their duty: to end this war, now, by defunding it.

And if Bush sends those brigades into the valley of death anyway, we must become more creative, more assertive, more aggressive in our protests and in our acts of nonviolent civil disobedience.

Our democracy is not functioning when the people demand the war to end but the leaders refuse to listen.

We must raise our voices until they have no choice.

"The United States cannot 'win' ... and the blindly arrogant assumption that it can win is calculated to get more tens of thousands of Iraqis killed and more thousands of American soldiers and Marines badly wounded or killed." --Juan Cole

"We elected them to bring the troops home, stop funding the war and for accountability. We're here to tell them we're holding their feet to the fire as much as we held the Republicans' feet to the fire."--Cindy Sheehan