“Who lost Iraq?” That’s the question nobody wants to have to answer, and if trends continue, nobody will have to answer it – at least for a few more years.

President Bush may or may not still think he has a “strategy for victory,” but the escalation of troops he proposed last week shows that he doesn’t intend to see America defeated in Iraq during his remaining two years in office. There will be no embassy rooftop evacuation during the 43rd presidency.

Indeed, it is evident that American forces are not going to be defeated on the battlefield, even on an urban battlefield: The recent fighting along Haifa Street in Baghdad is a reminder that our troops, backed by helicopters and jet aircraft, enjoy remarkable dominance in any fight. According to reports, American forces inflicted scores of fatalities on the insurgents in recent days without losing a single GI. So from a purely military point of view, the situation in Iraq is less than dire.

Yet, at the same time, as the Prussian military philosopher Clausewitz explained almost two centuries ago, war is “politics by other means.” Or to put it another way, war is a subset of politics. And so it is worth pausing over the glum fact that the United States finds itself fighting in the middle of Baghdad nearly four years after taking the city the first time.

In other words, while the war is going OK, the politics are going badly – in the Middle East and in Middle America. The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Bush called congressional Democrats to the White House on Tuesday, telling them that “America’s credibility would be shattered if the United States pulled its troops from Iraq, forcing close ally Saudi Arabia to look elsewhere for protection and potentially destabilizing Egypt.” That’s a lot of weight to put on the narrow shoulders of the Democratic leadership.

Even now, with the exception of a few liberal lions such as Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, most Democrats on Capitol Hill prefer to denounce the war as opposed to seeking to deny funding for it. To put it bluntly, Democrats are afraid they will get the blame for an American defeat. And the precedent of such painful episodes as “Who lost China?” in the ’50s and “Who lost Vietnam?” in the ’70s tells Democrats that they have good reason to be worried today.

Yet, even so, the Democrats are in better shape than the Republicans. Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., was a loyal supporter of the president until recently, when he began noticing that Iraq was casting a dark shadow over his own 2008 re-election prospects. Last month, Smith took to the floor of the Senate to take a different tack: He called the war “absurd,” adding, “it may even be criminal.” It’s safe to say that Smith speaks for many, if not most, Republicans who are facing the voters next year. Like the Democrats, they don’t want to get tagged with losing in Iraq, but unlike the Democrats, they are finding that the status quo is killing them.

Killing them politically, that is. The real dying is going on thousands of miles away, in Iraq. But even there Clausewitzian politics reigns over the battlefield, which means that there’s not much chance of an outright military victory for Uncle Sam, the best efforts of our warriors notwithstanding. Will there be some sort of political settlement, instead, perhaps with the help of neighboring countries? Or will the United States, or Israel, carry the fight into nuclear-bent Iran?

And if the war eventually extends into Iran, a country three times the size of Iraq, then what’s happened in the past four years would be just a first chapter in a long book, and Bush’s speech Wednesday night would be just a footnote.