The Bush plunge.

• Position: Comment - George W. Bush, Iraq War

The founder of The Progressive magazine, Robert La Follette, whose 150th birthday we just celebrated, believed that no President should be allowed to wage war without first going directly to the American people in a plebiscite. La Follette, who introduced a constitutional amendment to this effect, failed to win approval for it. Even 100 years ago, though, he understood the risk that the President would increasingly wage war on his own, despite the constitutional requirement that Congress declare war. Today, as Congress refuses to apply its brake on the President, Bush is pretty much free to do what he wants in Iraq, and he's raiding the vaults of the U.S. Treasury to do so.

Bush's Iraq War raises the fundamental question: To what extent are we a democracy? By launching the war on a pile of lies and now by pursuing it over the objections of a majority of Americans, Bush is acting more like emperor every day.

If Bush is left to his own devices, he would still have 100,000 troops in Iraq at 11:59 a.m. on January 20, 2009. The death toll of American soldiers by then could very well exceed 5,000, the number of U.S. soldiers injured could top 30,000, and the tally of dead Iraqi civilians could surpass 250,000.

And Bush would still say the mission is "worth it." Because to him it is a mission. In his speech to the nation on June 28, Bush dipped back into the well of messianic militarism and pulled out the following phrase: "This great ideal of human freedom" is "entrusted to us in a special way."

Aside from the whisperings from on high, Bush would remain on the mission because of Iraq's oil. When in his speech he mentioned a couple of times that Iraq is in "a vital region" of the world, he wasn't referring to its date trees.

He and Cheney and Rumsfeld understand that the world economy runs on oil, that Saudi Arabia's supplies are peaking, that the House of Saud is unstable, and so Iraq, with the second largest oil reserves in the world, is "vital." By controlling Iraq's oil, the United States also can have more leverage over the Pentagon's enemy on the horizon, China, which now desperately needs to import oil to keep its economy chugging.

For Cheney and Rumsfeld, this is the fundamental geopolitical reason for the ongoing occupation. To them, Bush's channeling of the Lord above provides a patina of morality for it, and the Al Qaeda threat lends it some off-the-shelf urgency.

Not for nothing the Administration let Abu Musab Zarqawi remain on the...