Listen Up, Mr. PresidentIs Congress using the Iraq bills to send a message?

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If Bush were shrewd, he would use the congressional bills themselves as potential penalties. He would thrust the documents in the faces of the Iraqi leaders and say, "This is what will happen if you guys don't shape up. I don't want to go this route, but the Democrats are going to make me. I'm not fully in control."

It's an old technique. Call it playing chicken or good cop/bad cop. Sometimes it works.

Maybe someone in the Bush administration is playing the game. Maybe some of the Democrats put forth the bill in the hopes that someone would play the game.

There's a curious clause in the Senate bill, stating that the troop withdrawal "will be implemented as part of a comprehensive diplomatic, political, and economic strategy that includes sustained engagement with Iraq's neighbors and the international community for the purpose of working collectively to bring stability to Iraq."

This is odd language to put in an emergency-spending bill. Congress can't force any president to adopt a specific diplomatic strategy or to talk with a country's neighbors.

The point of this clause, like the point of the bills generally, may be to shake Bush's lapels and get him to listen, to do something sensible—if not to end the war (neither bill really seeks to do quite that), at least to offer the Iraqi government some incentives to devise a political settlement and, more important still, to draw the neighboring governments into a diplomatic forum that might keep the conflagration from spreading if Iraq goes up in smoke.

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed. He can be reached at .

Illustration by Robert Neubecker.

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