Spook chief’s craven surrender to voices of appeasement? Which means, of course, that he’s speaking sense.

I’m not quite sure why Marty Peretz seems so invested in the idea that many New Republic readers believe, as he puts it, “that the notion of an Al Qaeda threat to the West is a hokey fantasy of the Bushies”. Perhaps Mr Peretz’s blog has a cadre of leftist readers who rarely crop up at TNR’s other blogs or on the magazine’s letters page.