He said: "Those who claim we should withdraw from Iraq in order to fight Al Qaeda more effectively elsewhere are making a dangerous mistake. Whether they were there before is immaterial, al Qaeda is in Iraq now, as it is in the borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, in Somalia, and in Indonesia."

Whether they were there before is immaterial. I understand the point. He said several weeks ago that while he still believes that going to war in Iraq was the right thing to do he wasn't going to spend his time now debating whether it was a wise thing to do. I get that, too.

But lines like the ones above strike me as unnecessary and unwise. We know al Qaeda was in Iraq before the war. Nobody disputes that. Reasonable people can disagree on how much the regime aided them in Iraq and whether Saddam Hussein knowingly gave them sanctuary in Baghdad. But Abu Musab al Zarqawi and two dozen al Qaeda members were in Baghdad before the war. There is no question about that. So taken literally the effect of McCain's statement is to turn a plain fact into a debatable issue.

But the real debate isn't about whether those two dozens jihadists were in Iraq, as McCain surely knows. It's about whether Iraq was part of the global war on terror from the beginning or is now only because we went to war there five years ago. He seems to be saying that the answer doesn't matter. But he's wrong. And the new IDA study makes clear that any serious global war on terror -- or, as McCain prefers, struggle against radical Islamic extremism -- had to include Iraq. In the twelve years before the war, Saddam Hussein was supporting an alphabet soup of jihadist terror groups across the globe -- from Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines to Ayman al Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad to the radicals in northern Iraq to the "Sudanese fighters" he trained on Iraqi soil throughout the 1990s. This matters. And John McCain, who has a better record on Iraq than anyone else who ran for president this year and still probably doesn't get enough credit for fighting back the forces of withdrawal in the Senate last summer, should know better.