In the five years since he launched the war in Iraq, George W. Bush has been able to pursue his war strategy pretty much as he’s wanted. His own party has been loyal, and Democrats have been divided.

In vote after vote, confrontation after confrontation, the president has had his way, plowing through opposition to his defense spending and troop levels and scattering the critics of his warrantless wiretapping program by accusing them of softness on terrorism. Congress, rather than forcing the president to spend less on the war and bring troops home, has time after time approved more money and more troops. Congressional outrage over government eavesdropping on U.S. citizens led to approval last summer of that very spying.

Now, though, in the dying months of the Bush administration, when the conflict in Iraq seems to have stabilized and even as there has been some hope for improvement, liberal Democrats have gathered themselves for a fresh assault on Bush’s policies. The Senate spent much of last week debating bills by Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold to cut spending for the war and begin withdrawing U.S. troops within months, rather than years. The temporary law on eavesdropping without a warrant lapsed in February after Republicans resisted a temporary extension and would not give in to Bush’s terms for a permanent statute — an act of defiance on a central tenet of the president’s counterterrorism policy.

This campaign may be hopelessly quixotic, given the liberals’ past inability to deny Bush the money or authority he wanted, and given the deep divisions within the Democratic party on those policies. Passing legislation may not be the point, though; nor is it to force Bush into action this late in his presidency. Democrats are more intent on shaping the national debate on these security issues through a war of words.

“It may be fruitless right now in terms of legislation, but it might not be fruitless in terms of how the parties are perceived on national security,” said Heather Hurlburt, the executive director of the National Security Network, a pro-Democrat policy group that has worked with party leaders on strategy.

The congressional debate now, in effect, mirrors the larger debate that will become more prominent once the Democratic presidential nominee is clear. Republican John McCain has already made it clear that he will be unafraid to take on Barack Obama, if he is the nominee, on national security issues. If Hillary Rodham Clinton is the nominee, the debate will be a more nuanced one, over the timing and pace of withdrawals and the amount of federal spending to be allocated for the duration of the conflict.

The Democrats’ challenge to Bush rests on three main issues: the escalating cost of the war and its effects on an already unstable economy; the question of how soon troops should be brought home from Iraq; and the changes Bush wants in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, and whether they are necessary for national security.

On each of these issues, Democrats are trying to frame the debates in more favorable terms. They are not, for instance, just continuing to complain about the high cost of the war, but rather are talking about how that spending — sometime this year the total could pass $750 billion — might be contributing to the country’s economic woes. Bush himself acknowledged that the economy is in a slowdown; others say it is sliding into recession.

“The American people are beginning to comprehend the eye-popping figures of what this war is costing our budget and our economy,” the party’s No. 3 leader in the Senate, Charles E. Schumer of New York, said on the floor recently.

Such a strategy permits Democrats to connect the top two issues in the concerns of voters — the economy and the war — and maybe sidestep a direct debate with Bush over military progress in Iraq, a debate Bush and Republicans are spoiling for now after four years of setbacks.

The apparent success that Bush and Army Gen. David H. Petraeus have had with increasing the number of troops in Iraq makes it more difficult for Democrats to challenge him on troop levels. “It seems,” Bush said acidly at a news conference last week, “that no matter what happens in Iraq, opponents of the war have one answer: Retreat.”

Just as with the war cost debate, though, Democrats have focused their argument about troop levels on the effect that the war is having on the overall readiness of the armed forces. There is mounting evidence that the war has worn down Army and Marine Corps personnel, hampered recruiting, and worn out vast quantities of vehicles and equipment. “Readiness levels for the Army are at lows not seen since the Vietnam War,” Feingold told his colleagues on the floor. “Every active Army brigade currently not deployed is unprepared to perform its wartime mission.”

Bush, though, seems almost buoyant at the prospect of a new confrontation with the Democrats. Almost every day he berates them for not passing his bill making permanent changes he wants in FISA to give federal agencies more leeway to eavesdrop on phone calls and computer messages of foreigners, whether they are speaking to people in the United States or not.

Bush’s insistence that Congress grant telecommunications companies permanent and retroactive immunity for helping the government eavesdrop is part of what brought the legislation to a halt and allowed last summer’s temporary law — which Bush liked but Democrats caught grief for — to expire.

Even Democrats themselves don’t expect to accomplish much on the war this year, beyond energizing party loyalists, perhaps diminishing whatever influence Bush might have over the fall campaign and setting the stage for what they hope will be a Democratic administration in 2009. Bush, after all, still has the fearsome threat of national security to hold over them.

That doesn’t deter Rep. David R. Obey of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and a staunch opponent of the war. Challenging Bush now, he said, is not a matter of strategy, but necessity. “I don’t have a strategy on the war,” he said. “I’m against it; I hate it. That’s not a strategy, it’s a conviction.”

Bare majority has Democrats groping for a winning strategy on troop withdrawal

With the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion approaching in three weeks and Congress expected to take up a year’s second supplemental spending bill for the war in a month, the Democrats will have ample opportunity this spring to confront the administration on troop withdrawals and military readiness.

As has been the case for the past year, Democrats have sufficient majority muscle in the House to push through almost any end-the-war language they like. And so what happens there is in a sense anticlimactic. Instead, most of the focus of the most vituperative antiwar rhetoric, and probably the most intense debates about bringing the troops home, will be in the Senate. The majority remains narrow enough that it can’t break a GOP filibuster — the situation that’s bedeviled the Democrats for a year — but at least they can use the Senate’s accommodations for televised speechmaking to make their election-year case.

It’s a risky strategy, though, even with polls showing that two out of three Americans oppose the war and think it’s going badly. The level of violence in Iraq has declined in recent months, in part at least because of last year’s increase in the number of U.S. troops, and the administration is taking advantage of it. Senate Republicans last week outmaneuvered Democrats and turned what was supposed to be a quick clash over war policy into a much longer debate on the war and the current outlook.

A majority of Republicans surprised Democrats by agreeing to debate Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold’s bill to cut off funds for combat deployments in Iraq after four months. Republican leaders said they were glad for the chance to debate what they consider Bush’s success in the war. The next day, they did the same thing on another Feingold bill that would require Bush to report to Congress on his strategy for defeating al Qaeda “and its affiliates.”

After another day of debate, the majority leader, Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, got agreement to pull both bills from the floor. He might return to them in April after Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, testifies and while the Senate is considering war funding.

Having had no luck last year trying to force through a timetable for the return of troops, Democrats are highlighting what they say are the reasons for bringing units home, such as the wear-and-tear on soldiers and families, the worn-out weapons and equipment, and the growing cost of caring for the wounded. “Given a lot of last year’s efforts with respect to timetables, I think our emphasis is going to be on the troops,” said Rep. John B. Larson, a Connecticut Democrat and vice chairman of his party’s caucus.

Missouri Democrat Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has already made concerns about the military’s readiness for combat the central theme of oversight hearings throughout the month of February. “Our Army has become overstretched and becomes more overextended with each passing day,” he said.

Skelton and Larson are among those who also want to expand the Iraq debate to include global issues they think have been neglected by the administration’s focus on the Middle East — issues such as China, a resurgent Russia and rising anti-Americanism in other regions. “A rigid focus on Iraq that blinds us from other critical national security concerns does not protect American interests,” Skelton said.

Many Democrats find little use in continuing to vote, and to lose, on various timetables for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, as staunch anti-war lawmakers such as Feingold want. “It’s going to take a change in the presidency to get a change of course in Iraq,” said the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Michigan Democrat Carl Levin.

The public is with them, though. In a Gallup Poll released Feb.18, 56 percent of Americans said they want Congress to pass legislation setting a firm timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops “regardless of what is going on in Iraq at the time.”

When the fiscal 2008 supplemental spending bill reaches the Senate, Levin says he will try to attach his plan requiring the Pentagon to start moving troops from Iraq within four months. Last July, that amendment drew 52 votes, eight short of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster. And Virginia Democrat Jim Webb plans to try again with his proposal requiring a rest period for soldiers at least equal to the length of their deployments, in effect requiring troop withdrawals.

Some Senate Democrats who are more conservative than their colleagues on defense issues, such as Ben Nelson of Nebraska, say they recognize the purpose of such votes but lament that they don’t show better results. “I’m not opposed to debating the war; what I am concerned about is bringing back something that keeps getting beat over and over again,” Nelson said. “It takes us away from other things.”

Indeed, some Democrats worry that repeated votes on the war might underscore divisions in their party on Iraq policy and put them on the defensive if the situation in Iraq continues to improve. “There’s no point” to the votes, said James P. Moran of Virginia, a member of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and a vocal war critic. “We may try a couple of times, but that’s it.”

John Isaacs, the executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, who advises several Democrats, said there is also a negative effect of repeated votes on bills that fail to become law. “It reinforces public skepticism about Democrats in Congress,” he said, adding that if Democrats were to water down the legislation to the point that it could be signed, that would be equally unacceptable to the liberal part of their base.

Regardless, a large number of Democrats are determined to press on with their calls to end the war, and party leaders in the House will probably allow some votes on withdrawal bills put forth by the Out of Iraq caucus, such as one planned by Californians Barbara Lee, Lynn Woolsey and Maxine Waters, that would fully fund the withdrawal of troops within one year of enactment.

“They are being driven by their constituencies at home,” Larson explained, reflecting the persistence of anti-war groups.

The administration is headed in the opposite direction. The White House has been planning to start this spring rolling back last year’s surge of troops, but Petraeus has indicated that he will ask for a pause in withdrawals once troop levels return to pre-surge levels this summer. A number of conservative Democrats, such as Rep. Gene Taylor of Mississippi, a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, will probably go along. “I would hope all the parties involved would listen to Gen. Petraeus,” Taylor said.

In a slowing economy, Democrats focus on the war’s domestic opportunity cost

Democrats have complained about the cost of the Iraq War since it began, although they have consistently appropriated whatever President Bush has asked for in the name of “supporting the troops.” That is a politically powerful phrase that Bush continues to brandish. Just last week, he described the appropriate role of Congress in making war policy as to “stand by our brave men and women in uniform and fully fund the troops.”

Having decided not to exercise their power of the purse to choke off the war, Democrats are trying with renewed intensity this winter to unfavorably tie the soaring cost of the administration’s “global war on terror” — the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, mainly — to the fragile state of the U.S. economy. The idea is to draw a line in the public’s mind between its long-standing dissatisfaction with the war and its current fears about a potential recession.

The two senators who are the party’s remaining candidates for president are offering this argument most prominently. Barack Obama frequently laments that so much is being spent on the war that would be better spent modernizing aging infrastructure, extending more college loans and expanding job training and child care programs. The country is wrongly allocating “$12 billion a month that could be invested in the kinds of programs that both Sen. [Hillary Rodham] Clinton and I are talking about,” he said at their debate in Cleveland last week.

Two days later, the party’s No. 3 leader in the Senate, Charles E. Schumer of New York, convened a hearing to highlight a Joint Economic Committee study of the “hidden costs” of the war, including the additional strain on the economy caused by the federal borrowing needed to finance the war as well as additional energy costs and oil price instability. The study pegged the war’s full cost at $1.3 trillion.

Democrats’ growing focus on war spending “does a lot of nice things for them politically,” said Douglas Foyle, a government professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and an expert on public opinion and foreign policy. “As long as the costs continue to be high financially, that argument is going to have traction politically.”

The costs will, in fact, continue to be high despite the current lull in sectarian violence in Iraq. Since 2001, Congress has appropriated approximately $651 billion to the Defense Department for the war on terrorism, most of it for Iraq , and another $40 billion for related diplomatic and foreign aid programs, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If Congress next month appropriates as expected an additional $101 billion, the amount Bush has requested to finance the campaign through the end of fiscal 2008, that total will reach $752 billion, and the annual spending level will have risen 148 percent since fiscal 2003.

Democrats have been unable to slow spending down even when they wanted to. In December, after promising that they would leave for the holidays before providing any but a fraction of the $188 billion that Bush had requested for the war in fiscal 2008, they capitulated and added $70 billion to an omnibus spending bill. Bush won by telling the public that some military units at home and in Iraq were running out of cash.

Their next big chance to highlight the war’s cost will come after the congressional spring recess, when debate will begin on that $101 billion midyear request. After that, Congress will begin work on fiscal 2009 war funding that could amount to about $170 billion, according to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. The administration has so far formally asked Congress for the first $70 billion of that money — a decision that most Democrats and some Republicans have derided as misleading and disingenuous.

The basic Democratic strategy has been to show how the massive war expenditures could be put to better use at home. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, for instance, has said that the money spent during 40 days in Iraq could provide health insurance for 10 million children. She regularly refers to the Iraq War as President Bush’s “10-year, trillion-dollar war.”

Similarly, Pelosi’s close ally John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, the chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, distributed a fact sheet last month showing that just four and a half weeks of war spending would double the annual cancer research budget at the National Institutes of Health, and the money spent in a day in Iraq could enroll 47,500 children in Head Start for a year. In the Senate, Appropriations Chairman Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia said the total cost of the war through this year would buy more than two million houses.

“Think what this war has done to our nation’s fiscal soundness,” Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said in a floor speech last month. “It has destroyed it.”

The costs are being added to the deficit, not paid for with taxes, Murtha and others have reminded voters. “You can’t put a trillion-dollar war on a credit card and leave the bills for our children to pay,” said Murtha. “The same Americans sacrificing in Iraq today will be paying for this borrowed war for the rest of their lives.”

And by financing the war through supplemental spending bills, rather than the regular Defense budget, Democrats say the White House is obscuring the fiscal impact of the war. “That’s a deliberate attempt on their part to try to make this war not seem as costly as it is,” said Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, a member of the House Budget Committee.

The Republican counterstrategy to all this is to present the cost of the war as a choice between some modest sacrifice and the chaos of terrorism. “One can’t even begin to put a price tag on the cost to this nation of the attacks of 9-11,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto told reporters last week. “It is also an investment in the future safety and security of Americans and our vital national interests.”

Republicans say the U.S. economy is large enough to pay the bill. This fiscal year, if Congress appropriates what Bush wants for the war, defense spending will amount to less than 5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, or GDP. Four decades ago, the Vietnam War cost 9 percent of GDP; the Korean War cost 14 percent.

Most congressional Republicans are betting the public is willing to pay the price. “I’m all for paying what it takes to win,” said Phil Gingrey of Georgia, a member of the House Armed Services Committee. “I can’t imagine a more important way to spend our resources than on the national defense.”

Still, a few Republicans like Rep. Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, a critic of the war, acknowledge that the mounting bills could hurt their party at the polls this year. The war’s cost, he said, contributes to a high budget deficit and debt and has exacerbated the declining value of the dollar and rising interest rates. He and others worry about the United States borrowing money from other nations to service U.S. debt. “Any great nation,” Jones said, “that has to borrow money to pay its bills from foreign governments cannot long be a great nation.”

The Democrats’ strategy mirrors the plans of anti-war groups, who have launched a $20 million advertising and organizing campaign to highlight the connection they say exists between the growing cost of the war and the deteriorating economy.

“For President Bush, John McCain and their backers in Congress, Iraq and the recession are as inextricably linked to their disastrous legacy as white is to rice,” said Brad Woodhouse, president of Americans United for Change, one of the groups in the coalition.

John Isaacs, executive director of the Council for a Livable World, an arms control group, said the cost issue will grow increasingly important for Democrats because the figures have grown so “stratospheric” just as the economy has veered toward recession.

However much Democrats rail against Bush and the war this spring, most have voted in the past to pay for the war and will do so again in a few months. Sanford D. Bishop Jr. of Georgia, a member of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, has criticized the war’s cost but does not think Congress should cut off funding for an ongoing military operation. “When we put our men and women in harm’s way, we can’t abandon them,” he said, echoing Bush’s argument. “We have got to give them the materiel and weapons they need to perform their mission and come back in one piece.”

In providing that money, though, Democrats have also tried and so far failed to add policy riders to the appropriations, for instance as a way to set minimum standards for military readiness. They are likely to try again in the spring.

Rewrite of surveillance law pits Democrats against an adamant Bush and united GOP

The one time in the past year when the Democratic majority in Congress successfully challenged President Bush on a major national security issue, it won essentially by doing nothing.

Unable to reach an agreement with Bush on a long-term revision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, Democrats had offered to extend the temporary changes they had made in the law last summer — at Bush’s impassioned insistence. Bush said he would veto any such extension, and Democrats could not pass one anyway: It was defeated by a combination of Republicans and a small group of Democrats, including civil-liberties-minded liberals and national-security-centric moderates.

And so Democrats won by default, at least for now, because in the absence of a new law Bush is not getting the expanded powers that he wants and that many Democrats don’t want him to have.

But ever since Congress took that tack last month, Bush has engaged in a fierce rhetorical attack against the Capitol, accusing lawmakers of endangering national security on every day of the arriving campaign season. And so the question is whether Democrats can keep their nerve amid accusations that they are hampering U.S. intelligence gathering and potentially allowing terrorists to escape.

“The House’s failure to pass this law,” Bush said at a news conference last week, “raises the risk of reopening a gap in our intelligence gathering, and that is dangerous.”

Though negotiations continue, both Bush and Democratic leaders are convinced they are in the right. Democrats also want to avoid angering their core base of liberal supporters, who thought they should have stood up to Bush last August. Jane Harman, a moderate Democrat from Southern California and former member of the House Intelligence Committee, casts the debate in Hollywood terms: “We saw the movie in August, and it had a bad ending,” she said. “I think the leadership did a good thing by refusing to participate in the sequel. We’re writing a new movie. It’s not clear what the ending of this movie will be.”

The law enacted in August gave the president broad authority — but in some ways for only six months — to order eavesdropping, without warrants, on overseas communications when one party is in the United States. Bush now wants to extend those authorities indefinitely and have Congress grant retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that allegedly have helped with the wiretaps. Several are being sued in federal court.

Despite an almost daily barrage of criticism from Bush and other Republicans, Democrats maintain that the expiration of the temporary surveillance law does not endanger the country. Some of its protections remain in place for a year, and the administration can still seek eavesdropping warrants as needed under the usual FISA procedures that were originally created in 1978, after a spate of intelligence abuses. Were there genuine and imminent dangers, Democrats argue, Republicans would have supported a straightforward extension of the law. The Democrats also say they have spent weeks trying to cut a House and Senate deal, but that Republicans have not bargained in good faith.

“There is a real understanding among Democrats, and the public gets that the administration is playing politics with national security,” said Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network, a pro-Democratic policy group. “That’s particularly true on FISA, where they are now trying to play the same game for the second or third time in a row.”

Polls vary, but the longstanding dominance the GOP has had when voters are asked which party is best at national security appears to be narrowing, making Democrats believe they are taking the right course when they stand up to Bush. Hurlburt said Democrats are at least within the margin of error.

“I think the president really has been discredited when it comes to national security,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the chairman of the House Democrats’ campaign operation. “They get it,” he said of the public, which in his view is buying his side’s position that Bush is pushing “amnesty for the phone companies.”

Bolstered by that belief, Democratic leaders have stood fast over FISA, and that approach has trickled down to freshman Democrats who are being challenged. Many have defended their actions instead of bending to the president’s demands.

Michelle Richardson, a legislative consultant with the ACLU’s Washington office, said top House Democrats such as Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland and Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes of Texas are “saying this is not a national security risk. There’s a whole different atmosphere right now.”

In Minnesota, freshman Democratic Rep. Tim Walz responded to advertisements against him over FISA with a news release that said, “Implying that America’s surveillance against terrorists is crippled is a lie.” Other lawmakers have written op-eds and barraged reporters with their own counter-campaigns.

However, divisions among Democrats, constant pressure from the White House and resistance from Republicans to anything not endorsed by the administration will make it difficult to enact lasting FISA legislation that does not include retroactive immunity or that puts many constraints on administration surveillance authority.

The pressure on Democrats ranges from political ad campaigns from outside groups to attacks from the White House directly. One group, Defense of Democracies, run largely by neo-conservatives and other strongly pro-Bush Republicans, has been airing a television commercial in the Washington area asserting that because the temporary FISA law has expired, “new surveillance against terrorists is crippled.”

Former White House political adviser Karl Rove told the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting in January that FISA should be one of the issues the party’s candidates talk about most in their 2008 campaigns. In Republican pollster David Winston’s New Models survey, completed last week, 52 percent said they believed Republican arguments about retroactive immunity, and only 37 said they believed those of Democrats.

On the other side, some opponents of major changes in the FISA law expect Bush to highlight possible terrorist threats in order to try to move Congress on the issue. “I think the Democrats need to be ready for some kind of sensational claim to come out,” said the ACLU’s Richardson.

They will be dealing with their own internal disputes until then. Already, some members of the Blue Dog Coalition, the most conservative gathering of House Democrats, are pressing their leaders simply to take up the Senate bill, which would give Bush nearly everything he wants. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, have united behind that legislation as the only acceptable path. The administration has threatened to veto any bill that does not include retroactive immunity, and has rejected several proposals that go beyond the Senate bill’s modest limitations on administration surveillance authority — including the House version of the bill.

Harman said Republicans have resisted attempts by Democrats to find a middle ground. “I think there are a lot of Republicans who would rather have the issue” in the campaign, she said.

Republicans, for their part, have resisted a temporary extension because they argue that Democrats have stalled and want to continue stalling in order to avoid addressing the issue of immunity.

Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, has filed legislation that would extend the recently expired law all the way to July 2009. Some Democrats and the ACLU think the existing FISA law is more than sufficient, and would be just as happy seeing no new legislation, or at most some narrowly tailored update.

Jonathan Allen and Patrick Yoest contributed to this story.

Current FISA debate, CQ Weekly, p. 440; budget request, p. 378; last year’s war spending fight, 2007 CQ Weekly, pp. 3718, 1598, 1348; last year’s troop withdrawal fight, pp. 2913, 2610, 1266; original FISA law (PL 95-511), 1978 Almanac, p. 186.