A leaked portion of the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) — apparently drawn from a single paragraph — says that the Iraq War is being used as a recruiting tool by jihadis around the world. And so Democrats are screaming that the war has made us less safe. The NIE has existed since April, and the timing of its leak — just weeks before the election, and right after a series of effective Bush speeches defending the war — certainly suggests another political hit on the president by hostile elements within his own intelligence bureaucracy. But the NIE’s finding on Iraq deserves to be taken seriously, even if we don’t know its full context in the rest of the still-classified document. We don’t doubt the contention that the Iraq War has propaganda value for jihadis. The question is what to make of that fact. First of all, many things become jihadi 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 the 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. It found reasons to hate us prior to the Iraq War (our presence in Saudi Arabia while we were containing Saddam, for instance), and it would have kept finding new grievances without the war. 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. This is an inapt comparison. 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 essentially a multi-faceted 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, we hope, with a government opposed to both of those things. That will be a significant step forward in the War on Terror. The short-term cost is that the war provides a jihadi rallying cry and that terrorists are flocking to Iraq. But they go there to hurl themselves against a U.S. military that is trained to dispatch them to the next world and very effective at doing it. Of course, they also carry out attacks against the Iraqi people. That’s why it’s a mistake to think that our actions in Iraq are the only ones that matter. The extremists’ savagery toward innocents is a serious blow to their long-term goal of winning over Muslim hearts and minds. Ayman al-Zawahiri himself has worried about this. If we succeed in creating a stable, democratic Iraqi state, it will be clear that the terrorists are opposed not so much to the “crusaders” and “occupiers” as to the legitimate aspirations of Muslims in the Middle East. This would be deeply problematic for them, as even Abu Zarqawi — not noted for his subtle thought — recognized. But this will happen only if we win in Iraq. In explaining that only selective parts of the NIE were leaked, director of national intelligence John Negroponte noted: “The estimate highlights the importance of the outcome in Iraq on the future of global jihadism, judging that should the Iraqi people prevail in establishing a stable political and security environment, the jihadists will be perceived to have failed, and fewer jihadists will leave Iraq determined to carry on the fight elsewhere.” Winning, however, is something Democrats rarely talk about. The NIE leak was an occasion for even more defeatism from the party that, insofar as it offers any distinct policy prescriptions for Iraq, advocates a premature withdrawal that would only ensure defeat. That would be the ultimate jihadi recruiting tool. Terrorists would be emboldened by their victory — since they are always more aggressive when we appear to be the “weak horse,” in bin Laden’s phrase — and would perhaps control some or most of Iraq as a base of operations. Properly understood, the NIE leak confirms President Bush’s argument that Iraq is an important front in the War on Terror, and that achieving victory there is essential.