No; not the answer to one of the best-ever Carnac the Magnificent questions.

Gimme 2 bucks on the Red Horse! Historians certainly agree with my opinion!

We speak here of the rah-rah efforts of the anti-war crowd. It's like watching a mob of punters root the horse they've backed to the hilt down the stretch:

Losing hurts more than winning feels good. This simple maxim applies with equal power to virtually all areas of human interaction: sports, finance, love. And war.

So writes our scribe, CHRISTOPHER J. FETTWEIS, in the Los Angeles Times. Are you surprised, dear reader, that the Times would select this editorial for publication? Then I have a solid foil pyramid hat I would like to sell you, cheap. Fettweis, I hope, does not mean this, unless by "equal power" he means "equally weak power."

Defeat in war damages societies quite out of proportion to what a rational calculation of cost would predict. The United States absorbed the loss in Vietnam quite easily on paper, for example, but the societal effects of defeat linger to this day. The Afghanistan debacle was an underrated contributor to Soviet malaise in the 1980s and a factor in perestroika, glasnost and eventually the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Defeats can have unintended, seemingly inexplicable consequences.

And as any sports fan can tell you, the only thing that feels worse than a loss is an upset. An upset demands explanation and requires that responsible parties be punished.

The endgame in Iraq is now clear, in outline if not detail, and it appears that the heavily favored United States will be upset. Once support for a war is lost, it is gone for good; there is no example of a modern democracy having changed its mind once it turned against a war. So we ought to start coming to grips with the meaning of losing in Iraq.

The consequences for the national psyche are likely to be profound, throwing American politics into a downward spiral of bitter recriminations the likes of which it has not seen in a generation. It will be a wedge that politicians will exploit for their benefit, proving yet again that politics is the eternal enemy of strategy. The Vietnam syndrome divided this country for decades; the Iraq syndrome will be no different.

The battle for interpretation has already begun, with fingers of blame pointed in all directions in hastily written memoirs. The war's supporters have staked out their position quite clearly: Attacking Iraq was strategically sound but operationally flawed. Key decisions on troop levels, de-Baathification, the disbanding of the Iraqi army and the like doomed what otherwise would have been a glorious war.

The American people seem to understand, however — and historians will certainly agree — that the war itself was a catastrophic mistake. It was a faulty grand strategy, not poor implementation. The Bush administration was operating under an international political illusion, one that is further discredited with every car bombing of a crowded Baghdad marketplace and every Iraqi doctor who packs up his family and flees his country.

The only significant question still hanging is whether Iraq will turn out to have been the biggest strategic mistake in U.S. history.

CHRISTOPHER J. FETTWEIS is "assistant professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College." Never heard of him? Prepare to revert to that state of blissful ignorance if the US-led forces establish any sort stability or prosperity in Iraq. Mr. Fettweis is backing the "we've lost, get over it" horse to the hilt. He's all in.

Hey; waitammint — I'm an American people, and I know a bunch of other American people, and we don't necessarily think the Iraqi front was a mistake. Fact is, several of us still think the historical jury is out, and that it may take some time to really figure out the depth of the impact of the war in Iraq, and what aspects were beneficial to humanity on the whole, and what aspects were in the main detrimental.  What went right? What continues to go right? What went wrong? How can we adapt? I suppose that, as non-professors, we haven't been fully trained to jump to conclusions and to publish them in major*newspapers.

And now I am told that "historians will certainly" disagree with my wait-and-assess attitude.

I'm feeling more than a little bit out-of-the-loop, I can tell you.

Now, truth be told, I know tons of people that know that the Iraqi War was a politically motivated war ginned up by power-mad liars. I caught wind of another discussion of this — by people I think of as intelligent and rational beings — at my workplace, again, today. It induces a feeling of madness in me, as if I were talking to a person on the street about this-and-that, and they all of a sudden start going on about how the illuminati are sending radio waves to control our thoughts. And I think: Yikes! Did I just hear what I thought I heard?

Thank heaven no actual, well-known and powerful people aren't betting on that particular Horse of the Apocalypse, thinking to themselves that rolling over in public is any way to run a nation.

What's that, you say?

... Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi challenged the president over Iraq by sending him a letter ahead of a White House meeting later on Wednesday.

The Pentagon report, delivered to Congress, is a quarterly report on progress on the war in Iraq mandated by law.

The escalation "has failed to produce the intended results," Reid and Pelosi wrote, saying that the larger US force "has had little impact in curbing the violence or fostering political reconciliation.

"It has not enhanced Americas national security. The unsettling reality is that instances of violence against Iraqis remain high and attacks on US forces have increased.

"In fact, the last two months of the war were the deadliest to date for US troops."

Pelosi and Reid also told Bush that they planned to send him new legislation to "limit the US mission in Iraq, begin the phased redeployment of US forces, and bring the war to a responsible end."

On the other hand,

The Pentagon report ... said the surge was "a greatly increased effort to secure turbulent areas to give Iraqis political space to implement reforms and pursue reconciliation among competing factions."

It added: "It is too soon to assess results." ...

Stupid military Bush-bots. Don't they know the war is lost? Don't they know that timely analysis is a waste of time?

* I know, I know: is there any such thing as a major newspaper anymore? But that's another question for another day.