With President Bush apparently poised tonight to press on with his misguided war in Iraq under some new slogan, it seems timely to review where we are and how we got here.

It is considered bad taste to keep recalling that Bush launched the war not only on the basis of faulty intelligence but also by end-running the constitutional mandate that Congress, not the president, shall declare war.

It's also somehow uncivil to remember that the invasion of Iraq violated both American tradition and the U.N. charter against attacking another country except in self-defense. That prohibition was conveniently dodged by invoking the fiction of a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

It's also now inconvenient to recall that the goal of the war was to bring about a regime change and, after achieved, to note that it has now disintegrated into a civil war between Iraqi sectarian factions that is none of our business.

In light of all this, would it not be reasonable and honorable at this point to say the United States has fulfilled its obligation, as misguided as it was, and now it's up to Iraqis to deal with their own internal squabble?

A defensible argument against this viewpoint is that in mistakenly and carelessly launching a supposedly pre-emptive war, the Bush administration has taken on a responsibility to help find a way out, and also to put the broken Iraq back together again.

The latter obligation will require many billions of American dollars in physical reconstruction and humanitarian relief of a society shattered by our reckless diversion from the real war on terrorism.

What that obligation does not require, however, is the continued and now-augmented sacrifice of American lives. Such will be the most deplorable price tag of Bush's apparent intention to feed into the Iraq calamity a "surge" of more U.S. troops that will only offer more targets in the sectarian crossfire.

Had American voters not voiced their disfavor of the president's bull-headed course on the war last November, he might have been able to cling to his stay-the-course rhetoric. But their resounding decision to turn Congress over to Democratic control has forced him into offering the appearance, though not the reality, of a new strategy.

It should be no surprise from all that Bush has continued to say about "victory" in Iraq that he would in the end opt for more of the same, to achieve the over-reaching objective of remaking the Middle East he sought to craft from his Iraq misadventure.

Like a gambling addict deep in a hole at a craps table and willing to bet his shirt on one last roll, this president seems paralyzed by his own bad judgment. He is unshaken in it even by the expressed doubts of military leaders he swore earlier to be his guide on what to do on the ground.

He desperately needs to be saved from himself, but it's not at all certain that the Democrats now running Congress will find the will and the means to do so. The hearings they intend to hold on the strategy and conduct of the war, and on diplomatic and reconstruction alternatives, are imperative, but may not budge him from his bunker mentality.

While House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said the first item on her agenda is to stop the war, she has also said the Democrats will not use the one decisive weapon at their disposal — cutting off the money for it. Denying support for American troops in the field would be political suicide, at least at this stage. The Vietnam war had run much longer when Congress finally took that recourse three decades ago.

If any group is likely to persuade Bush against digging himself a deeper hole in Iraq, it could be the small but growing band of Republicans in Congress who see his perseverance as wrong-headed. In Richard Nixon's Watergate travail of 1974, it took such a group to make him see the hopelessness of his course. History may have to repeat itself in this national nightmare as well.

Jules Witcover is a columnist for the Baltimore Sun. Reach him at jules.witcover@baltsun.com.