The current ongoing exchange between the Bush administration and Congress over more money for the Iraq war is familiar in its content and proceedings.

The administration is asking for another $189 billion, not only to prolong the now 4¹/₂-year war, now nine months longer than World War II, but also to finance the stationing of U.S. troops in Iraq for the foreseeable future.

In making the request, Mr. Bush's people have put front and center the fact that the new money will include $11 billion for Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles to protect our troops from mine attacks, even though that particular piece of the funding request constitutes only a small percentage of the whole. The emphasis on it is designed by the administration to make it difficult for conscientious senators, unwilling not to support our troops even though they may heartily desire an end to the war, to refuse the Department of Defense the overall package of money.

Continuing the pattern, the Democrats, who were clearly charged by the voters in last year's elections to bring the war to an end, are singing their familiar song. It runs that they want to, but because they don't have enough votes to bring a Republican filibuster to an end, they will be forced to bow their heads and continue to fund the war, in spite of its rising American and Iraqi death tolls and ballooning financial costs. Those costs, by the way, include taxpayers' money that various contractors are increasingly being revealed to be pocketing.

What needs to occur is that the legislative branch of government get its act together and play its ordained constitutional role by not continuing to fund this executive branch's unwise policy in Iraq.

If it doesn't, the Pentagon can easily find the money for the MRAPs elsewhere in its huge budget. The continuation of U.S. troops in Iraq until the end of time should definitely not be funded, ever. They would be unwanted by the Iraqis, highly visible and very vulnerable at any level.

If the Republicans and independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut want a filibuster, let it occur. It will serve to make those members of Congress who want to see Americans and Iraqis continue to die in this pointless war stand up and be counted in advance of the 2008 elections.