U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on Thursday that the Iraq war was "lost" and that he had conveyed the message to President George W. Bush during a meeting at the White House on Wednesday.

"Now I believe ... this war is lost, and that the surge (U.S. troop increase in Iraq) is not accomplishing anything, as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday," Reid said at a press conference.

He said that was the message he took to Bush at Wednesday meeting.

"I know I was like the odd guy out yesterday at the White House, but at least I told him what he needed to hear, not what he wanted to hear," he said.

Bush met with Democratic leaders of Congress as well Republican lawmakers at the White House on Wednesday on an emergency war funding bill, but the two sides failed to settle their differences to avoid an looming showdown over the legislation.

Both the Senate and the House passed bills last month that would provide money for this year's U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and set a timetable for the Bush administration to pull combat troops out of Iraq next year.

Democrats said after meeting with Bush that they would send him the bill and hoped the president would sign it into law, despite the president's repeated threat to veto it.

Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, said on Thursday that the Iraq war could only be won "diplomatically, politically and economically," and the president needed to come to that realization.

In a speech in Ohio on Thursday, Bush defended his war policy and said it was "the most solemn duty of our country, is to protect our country from harm."

He repeated his assertion that in order to protect the American people, the Untied States "must aggressively pursue the enemy and defeat them elsewhere so that we do not have to face them here."

A latest CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, taken on April 10-12, showed that 69 percent of Americans now said things were going badly for the United States in Iraq, and only 29 percent believed that sending additional troops to Iraq would make it more likely the United States would achieve its goals there.

A news USA Today/Gallup poll, published on Thursday, found that57 percent of the respondents now felt the Iraq war was a mistake, and 41 percent said it was not.