The leak of portions of a National Intelligence Estimate in a way that made it look like the Iraq war made America less safe is so obviously a political stunt that we wouldn’t want to make too much of it, but we wouldn’t want to make too little of it, either, for it illuminates the way in which congressional Democrats are allying themselves with elements in the press, the intelligence agencies, and retired military officers to undermine the elected president of America and his defense secretary. In Latin America or parts of Asia and Africa, this sort of behavior would be a prelude to a coup, and the American left would cluck disapprovingly. Yet when the intelligence officers and generals are intriguing with the opposition in Washington, it gets chalked up as politics, which is exactly what it is.

Call it the National Political Estimate. The Democrats would have the voters believe that President Bush’s reckless invasion of Iraq is creating more terrorists, as if terrorism itself is a cloud that floats over Arabia afflicting otherwise peaceful Muslims. The NIE, in contrast, makes a more subtle point, at least according to the key judgments released this week. It says, “Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.” In other words, if America can protect the government in Baghdad from jihadists, the threat of global Islamic terror will diminish. Should the project of a free Iraq fail, then the nihilists will be emboldened.

The Democrats seem to be loath to emphasize this last point, for so much of their base has already given up on fighting the war. We commend to them the December 11 communique between a senior Qaeda leader named Atiya and the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Zarqawi, since killed. In that letter — declassified by the Army’s war college Tuesday, reported by our Eli Lake on page one of the Sun yesterday, and rocketed around the world by television and Internet since then — Attiya complains, “We are in the stage of weakness and a state of paucity. We have not yet reached a level of stability. We have no alternative but to not squander any element of the foundations of strength, or any helper or supporter.”

In the end, the questions of whether the Iraq war has made America safer or more dangerous and what to do about it, these are not technical questions of fact to be solved by intelligence analysts or generals but political judgment calls to be decided by voters in free and democratic elections. The same American left that so vigorously disagreed with the military and intelligence establishments on, say, gays in the military and the dangers of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction is now willing to take the intelligence analysts and retired generals’ word as gospel on the matter of a Rumsfeld resignation or the effect of the Iraq was on jihadists. Which is just one of the signals that it’s all about politics, which is a good place for it so that the American people can, come November, have their say.