It's not a game, George

President Bush went on television last night to explain his "new way forward" to America. But his "new way" is strangely similar to the "old way." We stay in Iraq for the conceivable future, and more troops are sent into the line of fire.

See, if you're an Iraqi insurgent, then this "new way forward" is just leading you into a "target-rich environment."

You know, it's strange. Bush feels that he can ignore the American people, 64% of whom disagree with his handling of the war. He feels that he can ignore the military (a traditionally hawkish bunch): in a Military Times poll of active-duty servicepeople, a majority of the troops who responded disapproved of how Bush is handling Iraq.

It was just last month that George W. Bush said "it's important to trust the judgment of the military when they're making military plans… I'm a strict adherer to the command structure." But now, with his plan to put more troops into Iraq, he's even ignoring the advice of his generals.

But this is nothing new. Bush doesn't feel that he needs to consult Congress when he attacks somebody. He's proven this twice in the last week, both in Somalia and with the troops he's planning on deploying into Iraq. He doesn't act like a military commander - he's more like a kid with an army of plastic soldiers - you can almost see him pushing them around the carpet of the Oval Office, making "blam… rat-a-tat-tat" noises.

He's proven over and over that nobody in the Bush White House is a constitutional scholar. I'm not sure that anybody working at 1600 Pennsylvania Boulevard has ever actually read that document. Because the Constitution is pretty clear on the subject.

Way back in 1781, having just broken away from a King, the Constitutional Congress didn't support the idea that one person could unilaterally declare war on another country. The President may be Commander-in-Chief of the military, but if you actually look at the document they created, you find out that in Article 1, Section 8, it says that

"The Congress shall have Power...
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy;
To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;
To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress..."

But Bush isn't just ignoring the will of the people and the law. He's ignoring common sense. General Petraeus, who Bush just placed in charge of the forces in Iraq, drew up a strategy to defeat the insurgents in that country. Unfortunately, according to that report, the best ratio of troops to population, in a counter-insurgency operation like this one, is 20 per 1,000 civilians. But since Iraq has a population of 26 million people, that would mean that the United States would need to add at least 250,000 troops to the current 140,000 military personnel already in Iraq.

It's been a few years since I took a math class, but that seems like a few more than the twenty thousand troops Bush wants to send.

In fact, as Terry Jones (the ex-Monty Python member) pointed out, America has spent one million dollars per dead Iraqi. Strangely enough, it might have been more cost-effective to actually drop bales of money from planes to squash the insurgents.

But Congress has the power. Unlike what the nay-sayers want you to believe, Teddy Kennedy is correct. Congress has every right to tell Bush how to spend the money that they give him. In fact, they've done it over and over again.

It's time for Congress to start treating Bush like a two-year-old. If he won't pay attention to the rules, they need to take his toys away.