How many Democratic members of the U.S. Senate does it take to pass a resolution that doesn't mean anything?

I don't know, but it was more than they had Monday.

All they accomplished that day was a physical demonstration: If you tie yourself in a knot, you cannot locate your backside.

Democrats are struggling to figure out precisely how to oppose George W. Bush's tragedy in Iraq. That's not because of what they really think about it, which is that we ought to get out. It's because they're playing politics. They don't want to get in a position of appearing to undercut troops or sharing blame for what is totally Bush's folly.

The first and seemingly easy thing the Senate's new Democratic leadership thought it would do was pass a nonbinding resolution opposing not the war in Iraq, per se, and effecting nothing, really. This resolution merely would express Senate sentiment against this so-called surge by which the president intends to send 21,500 more troops.

The Republicans didn't want to see their president embarrassed or watch Democrats use the resolution to expose defections in their ranks.

Republicans decided to filibuster this nonbinding resolution.

By this scheme, Republicans would block this vote on something with no real effect unless the Democratic leadership first let them propose their own resolutions with no real effect.

One of these Republican resolutions, by Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, was a clever snooker. It would have expressed the Senate's resolve that troops had to be supported with full resources and that the president had the authority to deploy troops.

Democrats didn't want to vote on that. They didn't want to vote for the resolution and have to concede that the president had the authority to do what he was doing and that they weren't willing to stop him the only way they actually could, by cutting off money. And they didn't want to vote against the resolution because that would put them in the position of saying they might want to pull the money and the rug out from under troops doing what their duly authorized commander in chief had ordered them to do.

So, the Democratic leadership refused to allow votes on Gregg's and another Republican-offered resolution. That left an up-or-down vote -- not on their resolution opposing the surge, but on whether to end debate and allow a vote on their resolution opposing the surge. Ending debate required 60 of the 100 voters, whereas passing the resolution required 51.

The Democrats couldn't get 60 votes. Shoot, they couldn't get 51. They lost Joe Lieberman. Long ago, probably.

Actually, Democratic leader Harry Reid ended up voting against his own resolution. But that was only so he could be recorded as voting on the prevailing side so he could qualify to get the matter reconsidered.

Altogether, Democrats revealed themselves deficient in the spinal and cerebral regions. Yet they'd had two perfectly appropriate options.

First, they could have voted for Gregg's resolution. It, like their own, meant nothing, after all. Anyway, a majority of Democrats prefer not to cut funding to troops. Then, having extended due courtesy to the Republicans and dispensed with their little ploy, they've could have passed their own resolution by a simple majority vote, picking up Republicans John Warner and Chuck Hagel and perhaps others.

Or, they could have said to heck with the whole silly business of hollow resolutions on, of all things, war. They could have proclaimed that the Senate under Democratic leadership would engage in real, not cosmetic, work.

It's not as if the cosmetic work would go undone. It had begun to appear days later that the House of Representatives would venture into the nonbinding war resolution void.

John Brummett, an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock, is author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.