The surfacing over the weekend of what is purposed to be a videotape of Osama bin Laden, the first in 13 months, will be notable for nothing so much as its timing. It airs the leader of Al Qaeda just as our top analysts at the Pentagon, Central Intelligence Agency, and White House are combing through what they say is the most dire threat reporting since the summer of 2001. Mr. bin Laden’s words were broadcast as our legislators in Congress are mulling ways to abandon the fight in Iraq, even as our GIs and Sunni tribes in that country are starting to gain in the war against an outfit that calls itself “Al- Qaeda in the land between two rivers.”

For many Democrats and their allies in the press, there really is no such thing as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Never mind that Al Qaeda’s number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, only a few months ago claimed credit for the suicide bomb placed inside the Iraqi parliament; never mind that our generals in Iraq say leading Ba’athists have been sent from the theater to training camps in Pakistan; never mind that Abu Ayyub al Masri, who was associated with Al-Zawahiri, publicly pledged allegiance to Mr. bin Laden. The Democrats like to argue that the war in Iraq is a diversion from the war on Al Qaeda.

Senator Obama, the Democrat who presents himself as an heir to the Republican Abraham Lincoln, gives this rationale for retreat: “We cannot win a war against the terrorists if we’re on the wrong battlefield.” The majority leader, Harry Reid, this week opined, “Given President Bush’s stubborn dedication to keeping our overextended military mired in an Iraqi civil war, it is not surprising that al Qaeda has been able to reorganize and rebuild.”

The public editor of the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, issued on July 8 a column titled, “Seeing al Qaeda around everycorner.” Mr. Hoyt took his paper’s reporters in Baghdad to task for “quoting the president and the military uncritically about Al Qaeda’s role in Iraq.” After all, “There is plenty of evidence that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is but one of the challenges facing the United States military and that overemphasizing it distorts the true picture of what is happening there.”

It is true that not all terrorists in Iraq have pledged allegiance to Mr. bin Laden. But the hallmark of Al Qaeda is the massive car bomb, the destruction of mosques, and the kinds of cruelties aimed at plunging Iraq into perpetual war. When Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia destroyed the Shi’ia shrine of Askariya, a claim Mr. Hoyt questions over the pronouncement of the terrorists themselves, it was aimed at unleashing the civil war the left today says we cannot stop.

His column is symptomatic of the Democrats’ view — that a “civil war” in Iraq must be allowed to run its course. In this formulation there is no one culpable for the war except for the president who sent our army to Iraq that is now stopping it. What a bizarre view, all the more so for its being advanced at a time when we stand a good chance of succeeding because so many Iraqis have turned their contempt toward Al Qaeda, because more Iraqis would rather democracy win out over terror.

Tribes all around Iraq are forming “salvation fronts.” They offer a rough justice to the Wahabi interlopers that spend their fortunes persuading medical students to kill themselves in the act of killing more infidels. And it is these Iraqis whom Democrats seek to abandon by pretending the enemy of Al Qaeda is insignificant. Which brings us back to Mr. bin Laden, who presides on the Pakistani side of that country’s mountainous border with Afghanistan.

Before the war, America asked President Musharraf to use his security services and his military to be our front line against Al Qaeda in Pakistan. Secretary Armitage cut a deal with him that allowed him to keep his nuclear missile silos in exchange for a crackdown on Al Qaeda. But in the last year Mr. Musharraf signed a series of agreements with provincial governors in the border region who are openly partisans for the Taliban and Al Qaeda. It allows them a kind of home rule. Suddenly, with the uprising at the red mosque, Mr. Musharraf is fighting this cancer in his own capital. So President Bush’s strategy looks more prescient than ever — that the best chance the free world has today of offering a third alternative to Islamic republics and police states is to defend the fragile democracy in Baghdad. The alternative, to abandon the Iraqis fighting Al Qaeda, would be to do the work of our enemies.