It’s a bad start, and the risk is that the Democrats are going to throw away their big chance.

This week has brought comedy to their efforts, as the new Democrat head of a congressional committee on intelligence proved unable to tell Sunni from Shia, incorrectly maintained that al-Qaeda belonged to the second persuasion, and stumbled into paralysed silence when asked the same question about the Shia group Hezbollah.

The bigger problem is the lack of Democrat strategy exposed by the past five weeks since the congressional elections — and above all, the lack of anything coherent to say on Iraq.

The choice of Silvestre Reyes, the Democrat who will now head the House of Representatives committee on intelligence, is the latest misjudgment by Nancy Pelosi, whose arrival as the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives triggered so much excited anticipation.

Even before Reyes’ display of ignorance, in response to questions from a congressional reporter, Pelosi’s decision to pick him for the key post was controversial. She had passed over the committee’s most senior Democrat.

This follows the breathtaking mistake of Pelosi’s first moves after the party’s November 7 electoral victory, when she tried to insert a longtime ally as her chief deputy, despite questions about his opposition to the reform of ethics rules, and overwhelming House support for his rival.

But the concerns about strategy stretch beyond these early, inept decisions by a single leader.

On the budget, congressional leaders have chosen to put off tough spending battles until next year, agreeing to keep government spending at present levels until then.

That makes some political sense, in that it allows the leaders to concentrate on pushing through a few key measures, such as an increase in the national minimum wage, which they have decided are their priority.

But it deprives this budget, the first since the election victory, of much Democrat flavour.

The biggest gap in policy, however, may prove to be on Iraq. Democrats owe their reclamation of both houses of Congress to the unpopularity of the war, and to the collapse of confidence in the Bush Administration’s competence.

At the moment, they need do nothing but sit back and watch as Bush, looking more strained in each public address, flounders to find a response to the Iraq Study Group’s case that the US pull its troops out.

The polls are still sliding against the President on those questions. The options are worsening, too. The Iraqi Government, which may itself be on the verge of splitting, presented Bush last week with an unattractive suggestion: that US troops pull back to guard the outskirts of Baghdad, leaving Iraqi forces in the centre.

As the US military, Iraqi Sunnis and Saudi Arabia have pointed out, this is a recipe for persecution of Sunnis by the Shia majority.

The Iraqi Government’s request appears to suit the US by allowing it to pull back troops, but may, in effect, ask it to be complicit in sectarian oppression, the opposite of its aims.

At some point, Democrats will have to say what they think should be done in Iraq, if they are to look capable of winning elections, rather than accepting victory handed to them by a losing president. It wouldn’t hurt, when they do that, if they were fluent in the difference betwen Sunni and Shia.

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