FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The role of Congress in the post 9/11 world has “diminished to that of willing handmaiden or timid critic,” according to Donald R. Kelley, director of the Fulbright Institute of International Relations at the University of Arkansas. Today’s controversy over the relationship between the executive and legislative branches during war is nothing new. Kelley is available to comment both on historical precedent and on the present situation in Iraq.

Kelley edited the recently released collection of essays “Divided Power: The Presidency, Congress, and the Formation of American Foreign Policy.” In the conclusion, he notes that in the months after September 11 the balance between the executive and legislative altered as “the power both to define the nature of the threat and to initiate action . fell to the president.”

Kelley views today’s relationship between Congress and president in light of J. William Fulbright’s approach to the Senate hearings on the Vietnam War: “Fulbright today would have the same ambiguity he always had — he would both be critical of the short-sighted nature of the war in Iraq but also equally critical, perhaps even more so, of the legislative abandonment of its responsibility for critical thought.”