Last year, when the Republicans controlled both houses of the U.S. Congress, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly supported the President's strategy in Iraq, with even some Democrats joining the Republicans.

Last week, after an election transferred control of both houses to the Democrats, the House rebuked the President by adopting (as yet without the concurrence of the Senate) the following "non-binding"

CONCURRENT RESOLUTION

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That--

1. Congress and the American people will continue to support and protect the members of the United States Armed Forces who are serving or who have served bravely and honorably in Iraq; and

2. Congress disapproves of the decision of President George W. Bush announced on January 10, 2007, to deploy more than 20,000 additional United States combat troops to Iraq.

What just happened? The President thinks we can win in Iraq but he needs a troop strength increase of about 21,000. The President's opponents don't think we can win at all. The House just voted, non-bindingly, not to give the President what he says he needs to win. So now nobody thinks we can win.

But the House didn't vote to end the war in Iraq. On the contrary, they voted to continue to support the troops. The Senate, as of this writing, isn't going along with that illogic.

Meanwhile, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, declaring his candidacy for the next President in the 2008 election, said the lives of three thousand U.S. troops had been wasted in Iraq. Then he turned around and said he didn't mean it, because he didn't want to impugn the heroism of the troops. Nonsense!

In the first place, the troops, by and large, acted heroically, even if the lives of those who died were wasted. Look at Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade, which tells of six hundred who were sent on a fool's errand and performed nobly. Our troops in Iraq were sent on a fool's errand, and (apart from some notable exceptions) they performed nobly. To say their lives were wasted is to find fault, not with them, but with the fool who sent them.

In the second place, their lives were indeed wasted. What have we accomplished in Iraq? The first mission was to find weapons of mass destruction, of which none were found. The second was to find and neutralize agents of Al Qaeda in Iraq, of which there were none at the time, though there are now. The third mission, after the first two failed, was to bring democracy to Iraq. We did manage to get Saddam Hussein hanged and to set up an elected government that can't govern. That isn't democracy. Our intervention in Iraq has thrown it out of the frying pan and into the fire, from tyranny to anarchy.

Never mind the vacillating excuses for the war and look at what we did. We disbanded the army, the police, practically the entire government, and replaced it with nothing. The General Staff in the U.S. Army has five functional sections: G-1, personnel; G-2, intelligence; G-3, operations and training; G-4, logistics; G-5, civil affairs and military government. The last of these is to either take the place of, or take command of, the civil government of an occupied area. Our armed forces disbanded the existing government and did not replace it. G-5 did not function.

One of the ideas that drove the strategy in Iraq was to achieve the objective with a minimal armed force. One aspect of this strategy was to use contract services, instead of members of the armed forces, to do as many tasks as possible. Another aspect was ... was ... what were they thinking? How was Iraq to be governed if the existing government was disbanded without providing enough of our own people to replace it?

Oh, yes, the other aspect was that as soon as Saddam's autocratic regime was nullified, the oppressed Iraqis would instantly rise up, organize themselves, and govern Iraq while we looked on and advised them. That would have required a miracle. For one thing, no government can organize itself in zero time. For another, most of the people who knew how to govern had been in the government we just disbanded. For a third, as soon as the Sunni autocracy was defeated the rest of the Iraqis rediscovered their traditional rivalries. It's easier to explain why Iraq descended into anarchy than to imagine how it could have avoided anarchy.

So why does Senator Obama have to apologize? Our armed forces performed bravely, nobly, heroically, but (like the Light Brigade) they did so on a fool's errand that could never have succeeded. And who was the fool who sent them on that errand? Donald Rumsfeld took the rap and resigned as Secretary of Defense. But as Harry Truman put it, the buck stops at the big desk in the Oval Office, where George W. Bush presides.