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Not only is the war lost, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says, but two of his more influential colleagues in the debate don't even care to hear the Army's assessment of the situation.

As if Reid's reckless remarks didn't do enough damage - no doubt lifting the spirits of al-Qaida and leftists from France to Hollywood - House Leader Nancy Pelosi and one of the biggest cheerleaders for bailing out of Iraq, Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, didn't even show up this week when the Army's top dog in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, provided his first report to congressional leaders since the troop increase.

Apparently the president's mind isn't the only one made up about war policy.

Historically, House speakers get to pass on such briefings. And Pelosi said later she'd talked with Petraeus before his briefing with Congress. But this wasn't the quarterly General Accounting Office's review of Social Security.

The war is the Democrats' sledgehammer, breaking all big matters into little ones by comparison, and in a town built on appearance, Pelosi and Murtha's absences deserve notice.

Reid repeatedly speaks of President Bush being stubborn or, most recently, "in denial" about the Iraq situation, comparing the Bush White House with that of Lyndon B. Johnson's in the 1960s.

But there are great differences between the conflicts. Chief among them is one House Democrat Steny Hoyer finally conceded: This war will probably follow us home.

When the Democrats cut funds to the troops in 1974, the only people who paid the price, as predicted, were the South Vietnamese.

We're not going to be that lucky today. Yet it's clear we can't continue in Baghdad as we are - not because we can't militarily quash the insurgency, but because, once again, we don't have the political will to do so.

The military surge, Petraeus says, is working - slowly, but the results are encouraging, and we've only reached the halfway mark of the increased troop strength.

But, honestly, we need more than a surge. We need a popular and political willingness to fight this as a war and accept all of the peripheral damage, losses and sacrifices that come with fighting a war. That's something few want to admit and fewer will champion.

More troubling is the underlying and growing sentiment that Islamic extremists really aren't as vicious and cruel an enemy as, say, the Nazis or the imperial Japanese.

That's because they're not. They're worse. I say that because I don't recall seeing a clip of a Nazi or a Japanese child sawing off the head of a prisoner and then raising it up as a prize - a treat we witnessed recently, courtesy of al-Qaida.

That's the face of the enemy who will leap for joy when we leave Iraq and, inevitably, bring its knives and video cams to our neck of the . . . to our necks.