Not quite square one

Democratic majorities in the House and Senate hammered out a bill funding the Iraq war and President Bush vetoed it because it tried to impose a timeline for withdrawal of American troops. He feels that as commander in chief the decision about how to use the national armed forces is his; Democrats counter that Congress pays for it all and has a say in how the money is spent.

But there is no impasse.

Democratic leaders say they are not going to leave the military unfunded in the war zone. And House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) indicated yesterday that he’d consider benchmarks so long as they do not set what the GOP has called a “surrender date.”

There is high brinkmanship. Democrats can make a case that it is not they but the president who is denying troops support — that Congress passed a funding bill and Bush stubbornly refused to compromise with the will of the American people as represented by the majority they elected last November.

The president can equally easily argue that Democrats are recklessly playing politics with the vital national security issue of the epoch — that Democrats should do the right thing rather than trying to hobble the commander in chief for partisan advantage.

All the while, funds are draining away. Already discussion is turning to Pentagon-program funding that can be diverted to the war. There is debate about when the money will run out — one bruited date is July — and talk of short-term funding for another two months, or up until the end of the fiscal year in September. We suspect that the military will eventually get the money it needs for operations broadly decided by Bush, even though it might be granted in small increments to show the Democratic Congress keeping an unpopular president in check.

But the politics of the vote are less predictable. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) seems certain to lose Democratic colleagues with every string she allows to be cut from the legislation. Any bill Bush is willing to sign could garner more Republican than Democratic support in the House, an embarrassment for the new majority.

And the 2008 Democratic presidential candidates, particularly Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), face a dilemma. His chief rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) cannot hope to win the anti-war left’s vote and will therefore likely vote for a funding bill even if it lacks the strings that liberals want. But Obama has to decide whether he would rather risk losing support from the anti-war left by voting for a bill sans strings, or take the chance of being pegged as a peacenik by voting against a funding compromise.

As our columnist Dick Morris argued on the facing page yesterday, the freshman senator’s moment of truth may have just arrived.