First, President Bush's new defense secretary, Robert Gates, acknowledged to the Senate on Tuesday that the United States is not winning the war.

Then yesterday, the blue-ribbon Iraq Study Group refused even to use the word “victory,” making the very notion too controversial to discuss.

There was no mention of what now seems like the long-ago goal of using Iraq to spread democracy through the Middle East.

“We stayed away from a lot of terms that have been bandied about during the campaign season in the political debate,” said former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, co-chair of the Iraq Study Group. “ . . . You won't find 'victory.' But you will find 'success.' ”

This is, of course, more than just a battle over semantics. It is a battle over how quickly the United States can extract its troops from what has become a Middle East morass and no longer has the support of the American people.

The great unknown is how the president will respond to what can only be seen as a stinging rebuke of his stewardship of the war from a bipartisan group of well-known and respected senior statesmen.

“The real difficulty for the president here is that implicit in the report is the assumption that victory is no longer a possibility, that this is about managing failure to keep its consequences from spilling over and becoming exceedingly dangerous,” said Thomas Mann, an analyst at the Brookings Institution.

“It's a realistic frame, and more and more people – Republicans as well as Democrats – accept that. But I don't think the president psychologically is prepared to accept that yet. But the politics are crowding in on him and forcing him to acknowledge realities.”

Those realities have long since been accepted on Capitol Hill. It was a Republican member of the House who insisted on the creation of the group chaired by Baker and former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana. And it has been Democrats who have pressed for an exit strategy and bristled at Bush's talk of staying until victory is achieved.

“The president's strategy is seen to be nothing more than repeating the word 'victory,' ” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. “Victory? Our troops are stuck in the middle of a civil war; thousands of Iraqi civilians live under the specter of ethnic cleansing and suicide bombing.”

Stephen Hess, a George Washington University professor who is a veteran of both the Eisenhower and Nixon White Houses, said the report could prove to be “a life raft that has been thrown to the president. It is curious to see if he responds that way.”

Hess called this “the moment of truth” for Bush. The president can either seize on the recommendations – which are likely to be embraced by a majority of Americans – or he can resist them, “which would mean a country that continues to be very divided,” he said.

“This is the moment in which the president has to recognize . . . what the great majority of the American people now accept as the truth of Iraq,” Hess said.

To not accept that, Hess said, would “absolutely isolate him further.”

But some of the key recommendations will be difficult, if not impossible to achieve, such as turning security over to Iraqi forces and helping foster a unity government in Iraq. Others, such as entering into talks with Iran and Syria, are simply unpalatable to Bush.

More reports on the war will soon follow – from the Pentagon and the National Security Council – but none will carry the same weight publicly as this one does.

The combination of Gates' testimony and yesterday's report from such a respected group of elders could be devastating to Bush if he doesn't handle it properly.

“Both Gates and the report acknowledge some serious flaws and that there needs to be some change in policy,” said political analyst Stuart Rothenberg. “With the report out, there is a new consensus, a new conventional wisdom, that things have gotten bad, aren't getting better and things need to be turned around.”

The swiftness with which that new wisdom has taken hold is stunning. When the president stood in the East Room for his last news conference before the midterm elections little more than a month ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld still seemed in good standing with the administration and Bush was defiant in rejecting a change in military strategy. Eleven times, the president used the now-controversial word “victory.”

“I know the American people understand the stakes in Iraq,” he proclaimed. “They want to win. They will support the war as long as they see a path to victory.”

But one of the problems for Republican candidates in the election that followed was that too few voters could see any path to victory. And the study group's report puts to rest any notion that the administration has any idea how to reach that path or if it even exists.

“This is simply recognizing reality,” said John Mueller, who holds the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at Ohio State University and is an expert on public opinion and war. “Whether the president wants to embrace that, we just don't know. It's very hard to say you made a mistake when you sent 3,000 American kids to their death in a war that can't be won.”