Far worse than the buffoonery of the Democrats’ sleepover is the deeply bipartisan abdication of leadership on Iraq that it represents.

Neither the White House nor the Democrats can get past their talking points long enough to recognize the gathering dangers in a war that’s sapping U.S. fighting strength even as it makes new enemies for America.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously asked in a 2003 memo, “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?”

Then he promptly admitted he didn’t know. The Pentagon wasn’t measuring such things and lacked the “metrics” to find out. Rumsfeld failed to follow up. He didn’t want to know, and the political generals he’d sent to Iraq weren’t about to tell him.

Well, the latest National Intelligence Estimate gives that answer: During the Iraq war, al-Qaida has reconstituted and regrouped.

It may again have the capability to carry out a major terrorist strike on the U.S. homeland.

Yet, despite a more pragmatic defense secretary in Bob Gates and a ground commander, Gen. David Petraeus, whose Ph.D. thesis was on the Vietnam failure, some officers still prefer to spit-polish their own career.

Instead of looking for the metrics to extricate ourselves from Iraq with the least possible damage to our own and the world’s security, these political generals follow the White House line that it’s all about al-Qaida in Iraq, stupid.

The new NIE might as well be filed away with the unused Iraq war plans.

Gates gave a disarming speech to the Marine Corps Association last week. He talked about the Army staff sergeant who was elected a village sheik in Iraq, “given white robes, five sheep and some land” and told he should take a second wife, to thank him for his community contributions.

He described the Marine officer, known as the “Lion of Fallujah,” who dashed through intense enemy fire to save others in 2004, but then gave up his soft Pentagon desk job to go back to Iraq for the “surge.” Maj. Doug Zambiec was killed in May. Gates’ voice broke as he told this story.

“We are not going to kill or capture our way to victory” in Iraq, Gates told the Marine veterans, describing a complex web of adversaries in Iraq and the need for a longer-term view that discards “the conventional wisdom and bureaucratic obstacles.”

It would be good if some of Gates’ subordinates were listening. The coalition military spokesman in Iraq, Gen. Kevin Bergner, keeps giving briefings on the threat of “al-Qaida in Iraq,” of Hezbollah and Iranian backed “special groups.”

Yet the briefings lack Rumsfeld metrics: Under questioning, Bergner could not attach numbers or percentages to his assertion that al-Qaida was the “principal near-term threat” in Iraq. He admitted that only one Hezbollah figure has been arrested.

Tony Snow enthusiastically highlighted some of Bergner’s examples from the White House podium last week. What Snow didn’t mention was that not long ago Bergner, too, was in the White House, serving as a national security aide to the president.

Al-Qaida in Iraq represents a significant threat. But its exploits constitute a small percentage of the violence. The organization ranked third among violent Sunni groups in its statements and attack claims in March, according to a survey by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty cited in a report by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

And that’s just among Sunni groups. Many of those now planting roadside bombs and explosively formed projectiles that kill Americans are Shiites. As noted in the latest NIE, al-Qaida’s leaders are using the Iraq war, and the U.S. presence there, to recruit, refine, reach out and “leverage” its own capabilities. The war gives transnational terrorists the chance to field-test new ways to counter American conventional military power.

But worst is the blowback: The war has fed the expansion of “the radical and violent segment of the West’s Muslim population,” including in the United States.

So is the Iraq war creating more enemies than it’s defeating and killing? The NIE provides the disturbing clues.