Our Decider-in-Chief plans to send more troops to Iraq whether Congress likes it or not, saying, "I've made my decision." President Bush hints that in times of war, paying too much attention to the niceties of democracy hurts military success.

But he's taking the wrong tack, even if his plan to surge troops in Baghdad is exactly what's needed. His doggedness ignores the makeup of military success: Goals and strategy are only part of what's needed for a hard victory. In cleaving all these years to the business-school model of leadership, Bush has read perhaps too much Ten-Minute Manager, and not enough Clausewitz.

The classic theorist Baron Carl von Clausewitz's trenchant truisms are part of the war college curriculum; he wrote that martial success requires the "remarkable trinity" of government, military and the people. Government comes up with the reason to fight, and the armed forces bring the capability, he explained, but the nation's willpower must come from the people. Neither political power nor war power is enough without willpower.

These days on the home front, we are so distracted by the excellent questions of whether we have either an achievable purpose or enough military capacity in Iraq that we forget about popular will. Yet for a long hard engagement, we need it. And that means the government must engage and convince people and their representatives in Congress. They must buy in or we need to get out.

Every long fight in U.S. history has required the people's support or it has failed - and the longer the war, the more true it is. Retired Army colonel Ken Allard, author of Warheads: Cable News and the Fog of War, makes this point: "There's no such thing as a war that's too serious for debate. If we've got a problem big enough for us to go to war, then it's serious enough for debate and compromise."

America simply can't afford the "leave-it-to-us" approach to governing that the Bush administration promotes in an effort to get a free hand, because, as we have seen, it ends without a popular belief in our military operations when the going gets tough.

The Bush administration waves off congressional Democrats because they have no plan of their own. Yet what we need from the majority party is not a Democratic plan, but a democratic one - that is, a plan that seeks to engage the will of the people. The leadership the Democrats can give us in the Senate and House is to talk to the Republicans one office over. Congress can and should be what a past Supreme Court called the "great representative body of the people." This is its proper role, especially in wartime.

Both the House and Senate received a mandate in this last election to take a more muscular stand in the conduct of the war in Iraq. They can best do this by representing and leading the people the old-fashioned way. They can, and should, be the emissaries to the country and to their constituencies, to foster discussion, debate and determination from the people, then in turn debate and compromise with each other. Something like what we're trying to teach the Iraqis to do.

What we need now, and what the military needs above all else, is a unity of intent in government and from the nation.

Imagine being in a desperate part of the world, with a number of squabbling bosses unable to tell you what they want you to do. We here at home are those squabbling bosses - it's time for us to get our act together. Those who stand in harm's way deserve not only our best strategic thinking, they also deserve a strategy the American people are willing to support.

If the president won't do it, then Congress must act now to give America - and her military - both the plan and the unity.

(This op-ed originally appeared in USA Today.)