(An) honest tally of the record since September 11th has to conclude that the number of jihadists and their sympathisers has probably multiplied many times since then. It has multiplied, moreover, partly as a result of the way America responded. ...

This (initial Afghan) achievement, however, was cancelled out by the consequences of Mr Bush’s second war: The invasion of Iraq. ...

(The) pre-war claims of America and Britain that (Saddam) had defied the Security Council by keeping his banned chemical and biological weapons, and continuing to seek nuclear ones, turned out to be false. In the battle for world opinion, this mistake, if such it was, had calamitous consequences. ...

There were those (such as this newspaper) who supported the Iraq war solely because of the danger that a Saddam Hussein with a biological or atomic bomb would indeed have posed. But Mr Bush and Mr Blair refused after the war to be embarrassed by the absence of the weapons that had so alarmed them beforehand. ...

If it was all about dictatorship, what about the dictatorship the West continues to embrace in Saudi Arabia, and the quasi-dictatorship in Pakistan? ...

But worse has been his administration’s wanton disregard for civil liberties. Some curtailing of freedoms was inevitable. Yet Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the torture memos, and extraordinary rendition have not just been un-American and morally wrong but also hugely counter-productive. In a battle that is largely about ideas, America seems to many to have abandoned the moral high ground and so won more recruits for the jihadists. ...

The world must still strive to destroy al-Qaeda and, even more, the idea it represents. But it had better do so with cleverer means than those Mr Bush has used so far.