Misestimate.(AT WAR)(National Intelligence Estimate)

A LEAKED portion of the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) says that the Iraq War is being used as a recruiting tool by jihadists around the world, causing Democrats to scream that the war has made us less safe. We don't doubt the contention that the Iraq War has propaganda value for jihadists. The question is what to make of that fact.

First, many things become jihadist recruiting tools, and that's not necessarily a reason to forswear them. The war in Afghanistan is cited by terrorists as a cause of their rage. So are Danish cartoons. This doesn't mean we should pull out of Afghanistan or shut down the free press. We are facing a foe whose ideology is based on hatred of the West, and this foe will find "provocations" no matter what we do.

On the other hand, we can't be indifferent to the effects of our actions on Muslim opinion. Some war supporters have analogized the current conflict to World War II and asked what it would have mattered if, say, the Germans had been angry at our invasion of Italy. The comparison is inapt. World War II was a conventional conflict in which we could destroy the German army and the apparatus of the German state, regardless of German public opinion. In the current war, we are fighting a multifaceted global jihadist insurgency, and it is self-defeating to create more anger toward us unless doing so also promises to produce countervailing long-term strategic benefits.

In Iraq, there are such benefits. If we prevail there, we will have destroyed a dictatorship supportive of terrorism and Arab radicalism and replaced it with a government opposed to both ...