Here are excerpts from this week's lead editorial:

Reasonable people can and do disagree about whether it is worth going to war to defang Iraq. But how has the balance of that argument changed in light of the unsurprising fact that the terrorists have struck again? Did thinking about Iraq lower America's guard in South-East Asia, or anywhere else? There is no jot of evidence for this. Since September 11th, the Americans have intensified their intelligence-gathering in every sphere. Just recently this has led to a spate of arrests of al-Qaeda suspects around the world. If there was a failure in Bali, it does not seem to have been a lack of American attention but Indonesia's failure to heed the timely warnings it received from both America and others.
None of this is to argue that the Bush administration has performed flawlessly. As in any war, there have been both tactical errors and strategic ones. A tactical error in Tora Bora enabled the al-Qaeda leadership to escape. The Economist submits that it was a strategic error to confine Afghanistan's international peacekeepers to Kabul; and to give Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military dictator, a green light to undermine what was left of his country's parliamentary system. There is, furthermore, serious force in the argument that an American war against Iraq might turn more Muslims against America. The war against Islamic terrorism must in large part be a war for the hearts and minds of Muslims. That is uncontroversial. The hard question is how to win this part of the war.
Some of America's critics counsel a generalised flaccidity, in the style of Mrs Megawati: keep a low profile and do nothing at all that might stir up the hornets. Others compose a list of useful chores for the superpower to take on right away, the one common feature of which is that none of them is Iraq. Solve Palestine, solve Kashmir, end world poverty, turn Muslim leaders into democrats, make the lion lie down with the lamb. Curiously, it is assumed in the case of Iraq that American intervention is pre-ordained to be incompetent and that the looked-for benefit will be outweighed by the unintended consequences. Everywhere else, American omnipotence is taken for granted. Solve Palestine? A decade of intensive American peacemaking led by Bill Clinton failed, yet it is blithely assumed that America has now merely to brandish a magic wand or big enough stick to make Israel disgorge the occupied territories it has been choking on for decades.
Even in its present muscular mood, even with its present unchallenged power, an America that is asked to do the impossible, or which promises it, is bound to disappoint. Deliver us from evil, goes the cry from every point of the globe; just make sure not to stir up any hard feelings while you're about it.
This is an impossibility. America cannot fight al-Qaeda without offending the millions of Muslims who persist in thinking that al-Qaeda has half a point. And though all the items on that list of chores matter, all require a long slog. The regional conflicts in Palestine and Kashmir are a thicket of thorns. Democracy? America can preach and nudge, but cannot at a stroke impose pluralist values on all the countries where people are denied them. In the meantime, one of the weapons America must deploy against al-Qaeda is traditional statecraft, which often entails opportunistic alliances with the sort of regimes—in Egypt, Kazakhstan, Pakistan—Americans would not choose to be governed by themselves. There may be ways to assuage some Muslim “grievances” without tipping into appeasement. But do not expect too much. The chain of causation that is said to lead from Palestine to the decision of a terrorist to murder young partygoers in Bali is not going to be easy to interrupt by making an adjustment in diplomacy.
Above all, America must not let the things which it cannot do right away stop it from doing the things that it must do right away. In the view of this newspaper, one of those is preventing Mr Hussein, a proven sociopath, from acquiring an atomic or biological bomb, and so the ability to threaten or kill millions of people. It is possible, if the UN cannot do this peacefully, that the only way to stop him is by war. It may also be possible that such a war will further inflame Muslim opinion against the West (even though millions of Iraqis will doubtless rejoice in his removal). But all of these things were true last week, before a gang of terrorists killed hundreds of innocents in Bali. How perverse it would be if that crime were to distract the world from an action that could yet save millions.

Read the whole thing.