Jubilation on Planet Chomsky. According to selective leaks of a report by America’s 16 spy agencies in the National Intelligence Estimate, Islamist terrorism has been boosted by the Iraq war which has therefore made the world a less safe place. Game set and match, crow Ted Kennedy and all the anti-Bush crowd; we told you so.

It would be idle to pretend that Iraq has not become a cause to be manipulated for recruitment for the jihad. But that observation doesn’t get you very far. For a start, it does not invalidate the war. The justification for toppling Saddam remains as valid as it ever was: that he was an unconscionable danger to the world because of the axis between his sponsorship of terror, his ambition to lead the Arab world and his intention to develop weapons of mass destruction. Toppling him was always a high risk strategy because the aftermath had to be got right. It wasn’t. The problem lay in what happened after Saddam fell. The strategic errors that followed helped create conditions for the war that now rages in parts of Iraq and which has turned it into a recruiting sergeant for the jihad — errors for which America and the coalition must bear a responsibility. But the fact remains that had Saddam remained in power, we would now be having to deal with Saddam-sponsored terrorism, possibly armed with WMD. The argument that we only face jihadis in Iraq because of the war ignores this other side of the equation altogether. It is therefore, to say the least, disingenuous.

Secondly if wasn’t Iraq something else would have acted as a recruiting sergeant for the jihad. Indeed, something else did: Afghanistan, and before that Bosnia, and always Israel. There is always a ’something else’ –because these grievances are the outcome of the phenomenon we are up against, and not its cause. And that phenomenon is jihad, a concept that the west just cannot seem to get its head round at all. As it rolls on and on across the world, one cause follows another in a steady stream. But they represent the lava, not the volcano.

The fact is, there’s a war on. Not a war of our making – a war declared against the free world by the forces of Islamic fascism, which had recruited enough volunteers to sow terror round the world for the past, ooh, 27 years to be precise, from the moment Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran and declared holy war against the non-Islamic world which no-one took seriously at the time (and many still fail to do). Now there really was one hell of a boost for Islamic terrorism. It recruited hundreds of thousands to the cause of holy war – and that was before the Saudis got going, and before al Qaeda. In other words, it didn’t take any discrete grievance or geopolitical conflict to launch the war against the free world, recruit countless jihadists and murder millions– the two-decade genocide in Sudan wasn’t caused by Iraq, for heaven’s sake. The cause, the motor, the impulse behind global Islamic terror is simply a fanatical ideology that has set itself to conquer the world of unbelievers by force for Islam.

And here’s the amazing thing. When you defend yourself against a genocidal enemy, you know what – he fights back! And fights dirtier and harder! The anti-war crowd are astounded by this. They think the fact that the enemy is fighting dirtier and harder means one thing — we should bever have started defending ourselves, and now that we have we should stop. Clausewitz must surely be rotating in his grave.

In war things often get worse before they can get better because the enemy throws itself into the fight. The more ferocious the fight, the more you can be sure of that fight’s importance. The war in Iraq is ferocious because the stakes for the jihadis are enormous. If Iraq becomes a peaceful free society, the axis of terror throughout the Arab world becomes destabilised: the very reasoning behind the American strategy of regime change in Iraq. If they win in Iraq, the axis of terror is strengthened. So of course the failure to get on top of this is a cause for concern and constructive criticism. But to say that the increase in jihadis (a claim which, incidentally, does not seem to be backed up by any empirical evidence) proves the inadvisability of the whole enterprise is just idiotic.

It is possible that the leak, which is partial, misrepresents the document which puts this wider context. It is also possible that the intelligence world, which made such dreadful errors of judgment and strategic assessment during the 1990s, and which has constantly undermined President Bush over Iraq as much as anything to rewrite history and mask its own incompetence, is merely firing yet another shot in that dirty clandestine war against the President.

The bottom line is that this jihad against the west started long before even the first Iraq war. And any defence against it mounted by the free world is used to boost recruitment to the jihad. There is only one sure way for the west to prevent such recruitment: total surrender. That is the inexorable logic of all who inhabit the fantasy world of Planet Chomsky.