Today’s must read

Here’s Fouad Ajami with “Intelligence, jihadists and the Iraq war debate”:

Strictly speaking, the National Intelligence Estimate--another "canonical" document--is not a finding: It is an assessment of Islamic terrorism and its perceived links to Iraq. (It is odd, and ironic, that the intelligence agencies that had been mocked by liberal opinion for their reporting on Iraq before the war have now acquired an aura of infallibility.) Islamic terror did not wait on the Iraq war. The assertion that Islamic terrorism has "metastasized and spread across the globe" because of Iraq takes at face value what the jihadists themselves proclaim. It would stand to reason that their Web sites, and the audiotapes of their leaders, would trumpet their attachment to the cause of Iraq. It is inevitable that American analysts glued to jihadist cyberspace, and lacking intimate knowledge of Arab ways, would take the jihadists at their word. But Islamic radicals have not lacked for grievances. The anti-Americanism and antimodernism that brought them onto American soil five years ago predated Iraq. For the good part of two decades, jihadist terror blew at will, driven by the conviction in the lands of Islam and its diaspora communities that America was a pampered land with little zeal for bloody struggles.

Before 9/11 it was (almost) accepted that Americans would absorb a terrorist attack every once in a while, from the Marine barracks in Beirut to the USS Cole. The challenge now is whether we choose to keep bailing out this boat or to plug the hole once and for all.