WASHINGTON — Sixty-eight years ago tomorrow a great president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, asked Congress to declare war on Japan. And it did with one dissenting vote, giving our armed forces the full constitutional support and will of the nation to fight and, if necessary, die on the battlefield.

These days, another president has marched his Democratic congressional forces into a legal and moral morass on Afghanistan and Pakistan. President Obama has coaxed most of his Democrats into a mosaic of moral cowardice.

Consider the case of Gov. David A. Paterson’s appointee to the U. S. Senate, Kirsten Gillibrand. After Obama’s pathetic speech at West Point, she commented in part: “While I am not eager to send more troops to Afghanistan, after eight years of insufficient resources and lack of focus, we cannot

risk providing a stronghold for al-Qaida and threatening the stability of nuclear Pakistan.”

Like her heroine, Hillary Clinton, Democrat Gillibrand has learned the art of double-speak, mixing Dick Cheney scare words with the hand wringing of John Kerry. Like Clinton, Gillibrand is a lawyer. And she knows she was not even a member of the House when Congress passed the flimsy resolution in 2002 justifying President George W. Bush’s disastrous pre-emptive war on Iraq, which Obama opposed as a member of the Illinois State Senate.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N. Y., is also a lawyer, and knows in his gut that the 2002 resolution Obama cited as grounds for this war is ethically worthless.

“I’m going to weigh carefully the president’s words,” said Schumer, sounding disarmingly like “Saturday Night Live” character Jack Handy, who could always produce “Deep Thoughts” for viewers.

Reps. Brian Higgins, D-Buffalo, and Louise M. Slaughter, D-Fairport, already weighed Obama’s words carefully, and they both boldly said they don’t like what Obama is doing. “I see no good reason for us to send another 30,000 or more troops to Afghanistan,” said Slaughter, who heads the powerful House Committee on Rules.

Her use of “or more” suggests she knows some in the Pentagon would ship as many as 600,000 U. S. troops, as revealed by columnist David Sirota, into the wilds of the Hindu Kush Mountains.

Yet even the strongest Democratic opponents of Obama’s escalation, like Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, have not proposed that Congress do its duty by debating and voting on an entirely new war resolution. Why not?

First, the Democrats fear swivel-chair warmongers like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Second, the Democrats are now as comfortable with America’s weapons makers as Republicans always were.

The nation’s military-industrial complex means big campaign money, and now Democrats get more of it than the GOP. Weapons-makers make elective wars. Historians Barbara Tuchman and William Manchester chronicled how big guns made by the Krupp family encouraged Germany to launch three disastrous wars.

In 21st century America, half of the on-budget $310 billion annual defense budget goes to our own latter-day Krupps. Some recently moved their headquarters here to be close to the spigot. They spend $100 million a year on lobbying, and deploy 1,000 lobbyists to Capitol Hill. Total defense industry employment in this region tops 280,000.

They’re having a field day. The biggest, Lockheed-Martin, based in suburban Maryland, gets upward of $40 billion in defense work a year. Estimates for number two, Boeing, reach to $27 billion; third-ranked Northrop-Grumman gets $24 billion.

Is it fair to wonder if the $48,000 Gillibrand gets from weapons contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed, ITT, L3-Communications and BAE Systems affect her thinking?

Democrats: Clear the air. Produce a war resolution and give us an up or down vote!