It stands as a testament to the vastness and thoroughness of George W. Bush's debacle in Iraq that Democratic leaders must contort like pretzels to fashion opposition.

It's as if Bush has snookered the Democrats, not with good pool-shooting, but by so damaging the table that Democrats don't have a shot.

As articulated by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the unfolding and ultimately untenable Democratic position seems to be as follows:

-- The war in Iraq is stupid and wrong. The country is not accomplishing anything except to dissipate our military readiness elsewhere and engender resentment throughout the world. We've wound up in the middle of an Iraqi civil war on which there's no right side.

-- But we support the troops currently deployed in Iraq. With continued money, we mean.

-- But we do not support these troops to the extent that we endorse the president's new intention to supplement them with the help of 20,000 new troops in exchange for assurances of new levels of responsibility from the Iraqis themselves. We don't believe the Iraqi government is credible enough to succeed. We believe our own president is frightfully weak and desperate.

-- In fact, we want to bring home the troops already there, but in a few more months, four to six, during which time we encourage these troops to be careful amid those improvised explosive devices.

-- It may be that we cannot stop the president's deployment of additional troops. The president is, after all, the commander in chief. Congress did, after all, authorize his taking military action in Iraq. We would be loath, after all, to deny appropriations for whatever additional troops he might send to that duly authorized war as the constitutionally empowered commander in chief.

-- But, by golly, we can pass nonbinding resolutions opposing this additional deployment, resolutions that would be pointless, yes, except to force Republican congressmen, by their votes, to get out on the end of that limb with their president.

-- Well, it might do two other things, actually. It might signal America's lack of resolve to our enemies and distress our troops with an official stamp of congressional disapproval back home. But that surely won't come as news to anybody.

In summary, Democrats are positioned to get shared blame -- unfairly, sure -- when in the end, whenever that end comes, America leaves Iraq in what will be wholly Bush's folly and failure.

Bush can always say the problem was that Democrats went wobbly.

War is a matter of national resolve, or at least is supposed to be, and, in America's case, used to be. The time to oppose a bad war effectively in Congress is beforehand, when war actually can be pre-empted in Congress.

That's our real lesson here. The only members of Congress who can hold heads high are those who opposed the war's authorization but supported its funding once waged.

With the war subsequently revealed to have been waged on false pretenses, and when that war becomes hopelessly stalemated, it is the role and responsibility of the duly authorized warrior, the president as commander in chief, to possess the good sense to cut his country's tragic losses.

If he lacks that good sense, Congress lacks substantive options, absent impeachable offense.

The opposing party dare not take away funding for actively engaged troops. And the opposing party is vulnerable to constitutional and practical political attack if it presumes after the fact to restrain the commander in chief's options in executing the very war Congress authorized him to wage.

The best responsible course for the opposing party is to run somebody better for president at the very next opportunity, which ought to be easy enough.

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