Counterinsurgency concepts must form the core of our government's national security strategy.

Strategies for a global counterinsurgency

Britain recognized that an insurgency cannot be defeated, only damped down and eventually ended through a political settlement.

This hard truth has to guide efforts in Iraq, the sooner the better. And in the meantime, the more effectively the doctrine of distinction is upheld — that is, the fewer civilian casualties suffered — the quicker that reconciliation will come and the more effective it will be.

Drying Out the Insurgency

A work of prodigious research, "Cobra II" will likely become the benchmark by which other histories of the Iraq invasion are measured.

The reviewer, Sean Naylor, is a senior investigative writer for the Army Times Publishing Company and the author of "Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda."

I recently blogged about the reviewer's book, also recommended.

'Cobra II,' by Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor

Testifying at his own death-penalty trial, over the objections of his attorneys, Moussaoui said he had not known the precise date the attacks were to take place, but that he knew they would involve the White House, the World Trade Center and other targets.

He said he was supposed to head a five-man crew that also would have included Richard Reid, a British citizen who tried to set off explosives in his shoes aboard a transatlantic flight two months after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Moussaoui Testifies Over Attorneys' Objections

Zacarias Moussaoui, who is facing the death penalty for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, took the witness stand in his own defense Monday, only to bolster the government's case by unhesitatingly acknowledging the charges in the indictment against him and adding a few new, self-incriminating statements.

Moussaoui, Undermining Case, Now Ties Himself to 9/11 Plot

By Michael O'Hanlon

In his statements about letting Iraqis handle their own civil strife, perhaps Rumsfeld was trying to drive home to Iraqis the message that they should not count on the distant American superpower to bail them out if civil war begins. This message is grounded in a sound logic; Iraqis do need to step up to the plate and solve more of their own problems. But as a full indication of what our military plans would be for any incipient civil war, it is not the right strategy. Now is the time to reassess.

How to Stop a Civil War

There is much more at stake here than the fate of one detainee. Mr. Hamdan's case will test a broader strategic shift in the American approach to fighting terrorism.

A Bellwether for the Power of a President

I GOT back to Iraq two weeks ago, having been away more than a year.

Gone were the American tanks that used to guard the intersections. Instead, aggressive teenagers with machine guns and shiny soccer jerseys ruled the streets. They poked their heads into cars and detained whomever they wanted. There were even 8-year-olds running checkpoints, some toting toy pistols, others toting real ones. Whatever they carried, 4-foot-tall militias made me nervous. The streets now had a truly Liberian feel.

If this all sounds depressing, it is. That's how people here feel.

See also The Beseiged Press in the latest New York Review of Books.

Iraq Violence Turns Inward

This week in the magazine, Jon Lee Anderson writes about President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, of Liberia, the first democratically elected female head of state in Africa. Here, with Amy Davidson, Anderson discusses Johnson Sirleaf, her country’s civil war, and his time as a boy there.

After the Warlords

In modern-day Baghdad, the carnage takes a different, less organized form, but the state of affairs is truly apocalyptic. The few Western journalists left in Baghdad these days have armed cars to follow them to intervene in case of kidnapping attempts. The violence is so intense that it is impossible for Westerners to walk the streets—regular Iraqis are afraid to have them in their shops or be seen talking with them in public. I do not plan on returning to Iraq, partly because I have found it impossible to do much real reporting in such an atmosphere of corrosive fear. Meanwhile, Iraqis live with all of this and worse every day. Journalists who have left and maintain contact from the outside by phone watch their former colleagues come unhinged as each day brings more suicide bombings and their less well-publicized corollary: US air raids. A low-level civil war is already under way between the Sunni and Shiites. Where is it all headed?

The Walrus Magazine | Dispatches from the Void