The painfully extended exit strategy for the impeachment hearings may seem like child’s play to the Senate compared with devising an exit strategy for Saddam Hussein. President Clinton’s current strategy of damaging Iraqi defenses bit by bit demands a thorough congressional review before the United States gets into this undeclared war any deeper.

There are no easy answers on Iraq: it is run by a tyrant bent on expanding his arsenal of large-scale weapons. President Clinton is pursuing a policy of occassional bombing based largely on the absence of a better idea. Saddam Hussein has brought on the recent airstrikes by challenging the established no-fly zones more than 80 times since Dec. 28. The retaliation from U.S. and British warplanes has inflicted more damage on Iraq in the last five weeks, officials at the Pentagon said this week, than the four-day bombing in December.

But the missiles fired by U.S. planes don’t only hit anti-aircraft batteries. At least one misfire last month was said to have killed a dozen civilians near the southern port city of Basra. And while the United States can plausibly argue that Iraq is inviting the bombing by targeting the U.N.-backed planes, the problem of how to contain the Iraqi president while avoiding all-out war remains.

The problem got more complicated last week when Gen. Anothony Zinni, who commands American forces in the Persian Gulf, said he saw no value in tryng to support Iraqi opposition groups in the hope of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. “Even if we had Saddam gone,” he said, “we could end up with 15, 20 or 90 groups competing for power.”

So where to go from here is a mystery, but it is not a mystery President Clinton should be allowed to solve alone. Congress owes it to the American people to debate the Iraqi issue and attempt to find a solution that the public can support and the United States can stick to long enough to have an effect.

The regular skirmishes along the no-fly zones of Iraq have lulled the nation into thinking missile attacks are barely newsworthy. But the United States’ aggressive, open-ended attack policy needs to be held against its policies elsewhere in the world and considered by the public. Congress is the best place to accomplish this.