The resurgent menace of Al Qaeda should unify Democrats and Republicans against a common threat, not serve as another example of partisan rancor.

It would be enormously beneficial to his credibility if President Bush admitted to the public that his mistakes – including the decision to go to war in Iraq – stimulated Al Qaeda’s recovery.

Americans also have every right to expect a coherent strategy for fighting Al Qaeda (including its branch in Iraq, AQI) from Democrats, especially presidential candidates. Pummeling Bush on the issue is not a strategy.

A joint strategy should consist of keeping U.S. forces in Iraq until: the Al Qaeda threat there is eliminated; a more notable push is made to create a democratic transition in Pakistan, Al Qaeda’s present stronghold; and a stepped-up effort is engaged to bolster the weak pro-Western regime in Afghanistan.

But instead of treating the latest National Intelligence Estimate (concluding that Al Qaeda is again a growing threat to U.S. security) as a dire warning and a clarion for unified action, it was used as a trigger for more partisan wrangling.

As Washington Post columnist David Ignatius observed shortly before the report came out, there’s every reason to fear that if another successful terrorist attack occurred on U.S. soil., Democrats and Republicans would use it as an excuse for recrimination.

Democrats likely would charge, as they repeatedly have, that Bush: diverted resources from fighting Al Qaeda to invading Iraq; created a terrorist rallying point and recruiting ground there where none existed beforehand; and inflamed Muslim sentiment around the world.

They would be correct, of course. According to Lawrence Wright, whose masterful history of Al Qaeda, “The Looming Tower” (Knopf, 2006), reportedly is Bush’s favorite book on terrorism, “Al Qaeda was essentially dead” in 2002 after its ouster from Afghanistan.

In a September 2006 New Yorker article, Wright cited a leading jihadist theoretician, Abu Musab al-Suri, as saying that “the American occupation of Iraq inaugurated a ‘historical new period’ that almost single-handedly rescued the jihadi movement just when many of its critics thought it was finished.”

As Wright says, “Jihadists fighting in the conflict in Iraq have been trained in vicious urban warfare against the most formidable army in history. They will return to their home countries and add their experience to new cells springing up in the Middle East, Central Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and many European nations.”

And, as the NIE warns, Al Qaeda’s Pakistan-based leaders “will probably seek to leverage the contracts and capabilities of AQI, its most visible and capable affiliate, and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the (U.S.) homeland.”

The NIE also warns, “We assess that Al Qaeda will continue to try to acquire chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear material in attacks and would not hesitate to use them if it develops what it deems a sufficient capability.”

Wright told radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt in April that “if you read Al Qaeda the way I do, they see terrorism as theater, but also they have an appetite for blood. ... They want to kill as many people as they can. So, they would like to have a big spectacular, and I think that’s one of the reasons we haven’t had smaller attacks in the U.S.”

Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that there may well be Al Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States, and a chilling report released last week by the Middle East Media Research Institute said that jihadist Web sites operate out of America.