Let’s take this nice and slow. Say we’re both in charge of something, like a nation. We hold co-equal status according to our Constitution. I’m the President and you’re the Congress. Now, say I want to do something that you don’t want me to do. For argument’s sake, let’s say I want to continue a war that you don’t want me to continue.

It might seem easy, if I also hold the title ‘Commander-in-Chief.’ Aha! Well, when it comes to war, I would seem to have the trump card. But, also for the sake of argument, let’s say that I am just about the only person who wants to continue this war. Even my supporters aren’t all that thrilled about my war these days. Counter-balancing my power, you have control of the public purse. hmmmm . . . This is starting to get interesting.

Let’s go even farther: let’s say that all the reasons I gave you for going to war in the first place were wrong. We’re not going to get into whether I lied to you or was given bad intelligence. We’ll just leave it at all the reasons I gave have evaporated into the fog of war. There supposed to be weapons of mass destruction (read: atomic). There were none. There were supposed to be biological weapons. There were none. There supposed to be Al Qaeda training camps run by Saddam Hussein. There were none. There was supposed to be contact between the Iraqis and Mohammed Atta. There was none. There was supposed to be an Al Qaeda presence in Saddam’s Iraq. There was none then, there is one now. The only place where foreign insurgents were known to be before the war was in the north of Iraq, an area controlled by our good friends, the Kurds.

Further, when my original reasons for going to war evaporated; I decided to promote democracy in the Middle East. Never mind that the area has been at war with itself for millennia. Never mind that the Sunnis and Shiias have committing fratricide for the past 1,300 years. No one in the area asked us to bring democracy to them. It might be that democracy is not a cookie-cutter one-size-fits-all proposition. It just might be that we didn’t understand what the people of the Middle East want and that we oughtn’t to impose our belief systems on them.

Let’s expand this little discussion. Say that in addition to going to war on false premises, and then trying to change the reason when the first didn’t work out; I didn’t fund the enterprise properly because I didn’t want the American public to know just how much this war of choice was going to cost them. Instead of including the costs in the regular budget, let’s say that I kept submitting supplemental budgets and the cost keeps going up and up. In the meantime, I haven’t made sure that the troops have adequate armour: personal and on their humvees. Also, I haven’t made sure that the troops are honoured when they return home injured. I’ve also not honoured the dead by making sure that their coffins return in secret. It goes without saying that I haven’t honoured the dead by attending any of their funerals.

Now, taking all these factors: let’s run this through the logic machine. It buzzes and whirrs. It grunts and groans. It spits out an answer. On the thin strip of paper is a logic alert: “you are Wyle E. Coyote and you have just stepped off a cliff. DO NOT LOOK DOWN! Whoops, too late!” That’s right. I’m in freefall.

So, we’ve reached a point where I’m holding a gun to my own head and saying, “Don’t make me pull this trigger!” (Yes, shades of Cleavon Little in “Blazing Saddles,” “Nobody moves, or I shoot the nigger!”) No matter how many ways I threaten, I’m still lacking any logic to carry on this war. Now it’s up to you to deny me the funds. Honour our troops by bringing them home! For God’s sake, stop me before I bomb Iran!

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And, of course