That the Democratic Congress caved this past week and gave King George his $100 billion for the war in Iraq is unnerving news for the anti-war American majority who ousted the Republican Congress and replaced it with a Democratic majority last November. There are many who cannot help but wonder if the Democrats have the guts to stand up to Bush or if we were just fed a package of sugar-coated garbage by the Democrats and are now retching on the vial substance hidden in November beneath a thick coating of hollow caloric sweetness.

Hopefully, this seeming setback is in reality a Robert E. Lee tactic of picking one’s battles; retreating when you have more to lose than gain and waiting to fight on ground of your own choosing. For the Democrats are quite fragile right now and, after feeling the sting of Bush’s veto of their initial confrontational spending bill, one hopes the reason for appearing to cave to the King right now is in order to reap greater gains in November of 2008.

Democratic fragility emanates from both their broad political base and their history of ending up with egg on their faces when it comes to wars. The broad political base casts the Democrats in the role of having to try to please everyone while not offending anyone. For, while the 2006 elections gave the Dems the reigns on Capitol Hill, their majority currently rests on a number of locales in which a major misstep could return representation to the Party of Bush.

The apparent strategy for dealing with this situation is to avoid head-on confrontation and, instead, play the Dummy to Bush’s seven spades bid at the bridge table of national politics. If Bush is right about Iraq, the Dummy provides what support it can and the hand is won; if Bush is wrong, the Dummy provides what support it can, it is Bush who misplays the hand and it is Bush who must answer for the loss. In either case, no one can blame the Dems for not supporting what is currently the strongest hand at the table and their opponents in border regions will not garner support for removing members of the Democratic Party from the representation of their districts and states in Washington.

And the simple fact is that, at present, Bush holds the strongest hand at the table. In 2003, the Republican Congress, along with some erstwhile help from certain Democrats who now wish they’d played things differently, handed Bush a blank check for the conquest of Iraq. Any challenge to that check now is met with the neoconservative mantra of “failing to support our troops.” Never mind that commitment to leaving the troops in place without sufficient funding might also be reasonably viewed as failure to support.

So, from a political point of view, the Democrats simply cannot afford a direct confrontation with Bush over funding for the troops without running a significant risk of detrimental effects to their hopes for 2008. Better to go along now and hope the funding constitutes enough rope to let Bush hang not only himself, but his entire party.

The other reason the Democrats must feel a bit uneasy over confronting Bush is the fifty-five-year history of taking it on the chin with the blame for post-war situations.

Forget the liberation of Europe under FDR and the saving of South Korea under Truman. In the 1950’s, the Democrats were chastened by McCarthy and Nixon for their failure to limit the geography controlled by Stalin following World War II and by Mao following the Korean conflict.

Then, of course, there was the Vietnam conflict. Begun under Democrats Kennedy and Johnson, the conflict continued to expand during Nixon’s first term in office. We only began our withdrawal when a then-Democratic Congress enacted severe cuts in the budget for Vietnam. The result of this was blame for the conflict laid at the feet of the Democrats. After our Vietnam withdrawal, heaped upon the blame for that conflict was perceived responsibility for the fall of Saigon to the Communists and, even, the Pol Pot excursion into genocide in Cambodia.

For the last half of the twentieth century, whether accurate or not, whether fair or not, the Democratic Party managed to find itself holding the bag for most of the accusations of failure resulting from America’s involvement in international warfare. So, it is perfectly understandable that the Dems are reluctant to enter into a headlong confrontation with the Bush administration when the odds of a favorable result are far from certain.

So now we have funding approved to maintain the troops in Iraq for the remainder of 2007. The result will be either the success that has been envisioned by the Bush Administration for over four years now, or the continuation of internal destabilization of Iraq with the attendant deaths of more U.S. servicemen. The first possibility, while remote in probability of occurrence, would validate in the minds of many Americans the course of action to which Bush has adhered counter to the wishes of the majority of Americans. Such a result would offer the Republicans a chance to both retain the Whitehouse and regain the majority in Congress in 2008.

The second possibility, as obscene and unspeakable as it may be, plays to the results for which the American people voted in 2006. For now that the King has his funding, if he cannot wring success out of that funding, his only recourse to revive the Republican party will be to revert to his standard policy of ignoring the facts while trying to convince the American people that the truth is whatever the King says it is. Hopefully, 2006 showed the American people are a bit less gullible than in the three previous elections.