JUST WHAT WAR do Sens. John McCain, John Warner, Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins think the United States is fighting?

Last week these four Republicans joined Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee in voting to prevent CIA officers who interrogate terror suspects from being any rougher on said suspects than Mary Poppins would be.

The four argued that allowing U.S. operatives to be rough with terrorists during questioning would put our own forces in danger of being subjected to the same treatment. They were joined by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who wrote in an open letter that Bush's plan "would put our own troops at risk."

In July terrorists in Iraq released a video showing the bodies of two U.S. soldiers they had tortured and killed. One had his jaw broken. The other, his chest cut open, had been decapitated. How much more at risk can our forces get?

We are not at war with the al-Qaida Women's Knitting Club. Even if we had all terror suspects flown first-class to Chicago and interrogated on Oprah Winfrey's couch it would not reduce by one iota the enemy's resolve to bring our civilization to a bloody end by the most barbaric means.

Furthermore, Bush is not advocating that we stoop to the terrorists' level. He wants to get U.S. interrogators around a Geneva Convention clause (wrongly applied to al-Qaida by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year) forbidding "affronts to personal dignity."

Bush still would require our operatives to abide by the bulk of the Geneva Conventions.

On the day the Armed Services Committee voted to reject Bush's proposal, the bodies of dozens of torture victims were found dumped throughout Baghdad. Earlier this month six blindfolded and tortured bodies were found floating in the Tigris River and a decapitated body was found in Musayyib. This is the type of enemy we face. But Colin Powell claims that the world would view us as the bad guys if we let our intelligence officers scream at a terrorist and maybe get physically rough with him.

As author Richard Miniter wrote last week after visiting the prison at Guantanamo Bay, "America has never faced an enemy who has so ruthlessly broken all of the rules of war -- yet never has an enemy been treated so well.

"Of Gitmo's several camps, military records show that the one with the most lenient rules is the one with the most incidents and vice versa. There is a lesson in this: We should worry less about detainee safety and more about our own."

We don't have to torture suspects to get them to tell us what they know. But softening all interrogations to remove even the slightest rough edges withdraws a potentially effective weapon from our arsenal, one that we don't even have to use for it to work.

Obviously, the United States cannot and should not throw off all of civilization's constraints in conducting this war.

But we need to understand that a very small number of those constraints, while correctly followed in a conventional war, are obsolete in this one.

If playing rough with a captured terrorist can save lives -- and there is strong evidence that it can and has -- Congress must not forbid it, no matter what the Supreme Court has said.