John Burgess, writing in the Wash Post (Jan. 28, 2004):

Sallyann Sack recalls the rainy day in 2000 that she spent on the Hamburg waterfront, hoping to find clues to the voyage her grandmother had begun there a century earlier. The rooming houses where the 16-year-old Jewish girl might have stayed before traveling alone to America had disappeared; so had most of the administrative buildings of the time.

But then her guide said, "Sally, I cannot show you the boarding house where your grandmother stayed when she was waiting to board the ship, but I can promise you that she walked along this street."

With those words, the Bethesda woman said she felt suddenly and profoundly the presence of her forebear. The gift came courtesy of Juergen Sielemann, a courtly German who at his desk at the Hamburg State Archive has made it his business for more than 30 years to organize and publicize the historical record of Jews in Hamburg. On his own time, he helps people such as Sack who come to conduct searches on a more personal scale.

On Tuesday evening, Sielemann stood before the German Parliament in Berlin and accepted an Obermayer German Jewish History Award for his efforts. Back in Bethesda, Sack was particularly happy to hear the news because she was one of several people who had nominated him for the honor. The award is presented each year to five non-Jewish Germans who have made outstanding contributions to the reassembling of the German Jewish record, shattered more than half a century ago.

"I have been personally touched" by the history of Hamburg's Jews, Sielemann said Tuesday in an interview, explaining his dedication to a community that was all but wiped out by Nazi deportations. "It upsets me. I feel I have to do something, and I feel I'm not doing enough."

His thick glasses and calm manner fit the image of a profession based on the love of documents, and he seemed both amused by and uneasy with the attention his work has generated.

But Sielemann is something of a star in the world of Jewish genealogy. A regular at conferences in the United States, Britain and Israel, he is renowned for his encyclopedic knowledge -- he knows the street numbers of those lost boarding houses, for example. He founded Germany's only Jewish genealogical society. And he has helped put Hamburg's emigration records online so that people worldwide can search for information about forebears who might have set out from the North German port en route to the United States.

"He's one of those Germans who's devoted their professional lives to making sure that Jewish heritage and history isn't lost," Sack said. "He obviously feels as a German the burden of the Holocaust."

Frank Bajohr, a historian at the Research Institute for Contemporary History in Hamburg who has conducted research with Sielemann, said the man has remarkable energy. "He's highly engaged," said Bajohr, a specialist in Nazi confiscation of Jewish property.

The awards were given on the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, which Germany has adopted as an official day of remembrance of the victims of Nazism. In Parliament on Tuesday morning, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, his cabinet and legislators listened reverently to an address by Simone Veil, an Auschwitz survivor who became president of the European Parliament.

Through such events, Germans learn their country's history. Some prefer to forget it, others invest their own time and money in making sure that no one will. Tuesday's recipients of the prize, which is administered by the Massachusetts-based Obermayer Foundation, also included a doctor who has restored a Jewish cemetery, recovering old headstones that had been used for steps in nearby houses, and another doctor who helped save a former Jewish community center from demolition.

As Sielemann tells it, he pretty much stumbled into his life work. He was born in 1944, just south of Hamburg, and so has no personal memories of the prewar community or the war. As a 20-year-old with a general interest in history, he was hired by the Hamburg State Archive in 1966 and three years later took over the Jewish files.

There were quite a few. Hamburg's Jews had agreed in the 19th century to deposit their documents with the government for safekeeping, and many of those papers survived the Allied bombs -- birth, marriage and death certificates from local synagogues were there to examine. So were passenger lists from the ships that took immigrants from all over Central and Eastern Europe across the Atlantic.

As he made his way through the stacks of papers, Sielemann said, he became fascinated with the centuries-long Jewish presence in Hamburg. In 1933, the year Adolf Hitler took power, there were about 24,000 people in the city observing three strands of Judaism.

But for years, he felt as if he were laboring alone on an island. In Germany until the late 1970s, he said, "there was really no interest, there was no discussion, there was nothing on the subject of the Holocaust and Jewish history. Silence. . . . So that meant that the younger generation had to learn not from the elder generation but by themselves."

Gradually he began to make contacts with survivors from abroad, with relatives of the dead and with a small but reconstituting Jewish community in Hamburg itself.

Sack, a clinical psychologist who is active in genealogical groups, first came into contact with Sielemann in 1984, when he wrote to ask her if a gentile would be welcome at a conference the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington was organizing in Jerusalem. She recalls laughing and responding: Of course, as long as you pay the fee.

A string of initiatives followed from her friend in Hamburg: in 1996 the German Jewish genealogical society, in 1999 the online directory. Last year, he was the driving force behind an invitation that the Hamburg city government extended to the descendants of the one millionth immigrant who embarked at Hamburg.

On Wednesday, Sielemann planned to head back to his office in Hamburg. For her part, Sack said she felt embarrassed that she didn't nominate her friend for the prize earlier. The reason, she said, was that "he seems so much like one of us, even though he's not Jewish."

Tina Brown, writing in the Washington Post (Dec. 4, 2003):

It's odd how fast grandeur becomes gloomy when the miasma of misfortune sets in. No one could have predicted that the book party for Conrad Black's monumental study of Franklin D. Roosevelt at New York's Four Seasons restaurant would coincide with his stepping down as CEO of the publishing company Hollinger International -- owner of the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post and, in the U.K., the Daily and Sunday Telegraph and the venerable conservative weekly the Spectator -- under a cloud of allegations of financial self-dealing and an SEC investigation.

Even with hosts as luminous as philanthropist Jayne Wrightsman and fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, acceptances shrank to a small band of loyalists like Henry Kissinger and Ronald Perelman. Unfortunately for Black, a packed, convivial book party for former treasury secretary Robert Rubin was coincidentally raging in the next room. "I'm just doing a fly-by," one society hostess said as she scurried through to the Rubin fiesta beyond.

The strangest moment was when the deposed chairman of Sotheby's, and ex-con, Alfred A. Taubman sidled in. In December 2000, when Lord Black celebrated his wife's 60th birthday with a luxe blowout at another swell New York restaurant, La Grenouille, he baffled the guests with a long, mellifluous toast to the honesty, sobriety, integrity etc., of Taubman -- the relevance of which became clear only months later when honest Al was indicted in a price-fixing scandal at the venerable auction house. Now Taubman was offering reciprocal loyalty.

The meager turnout was a bummer, since Black's 1,300-page biography has had stellar reviews. Historians from Alan Brinkley to Daniel Yergin have hailed it as the best single volume on the many perplexing aspects of FDR's political life. A belligerent neo-con before it was fashionable, Black has paradoxically contrived to write an admiring appraisal of Roosevelt's pre-Pearl Harbor reluctance to fight the Nazis and the economic interventionism of the New Deal for which neo-cons of the '30s bitterly reviled FDR as "that man."

What's interesting about Black is that he's a throwback to the era when media moguls were still called press lords. His eyes sparkle with self-regard but he is at logorrheic ease on any subject with a historical reference. His wife, Barbara Amiel, writes a sharply barbed, rousingly pro-Israel column in the Telegraph. She famously caused interesting trouble when she wrote up the anti-Semitic remarks made by the French ambassador at a dinner he thought was private. She gets away with it because she's not only Lady Black but a brainy, brunette femme fatale with spectacular cleavage. Once, at a dinner party at the publisher Lord Weidenfeld's Chelsea apartment (the party was for Al Taubman, as it happens), I appreciated the deftness with which at cocktail hour she reconnoitered the dining room to switch place cards and seat herself next to a less grand but more amusing man. It was a moment right out of Anthony Trollope.

James Sobotka, writing in frontpagemag.com (Dec. 5, 2003):

When I first saw the flyer announcing Daniel Pipes' upcoming visit to the University of Illinois campus this week, my first thought was, "How long until The Daily Illini decides to smear him?"

Predictably, Wednesday's DI editorial (which, interestingly enough does not appear online) and recent published letters have spared no rhetoric to discredit him.

"Pipes is an extremist," declares the DI, and verifies this with an out-of-context quotation more than ten years old. This is not all. The Daily Illini has been running a campaign against Dr. Pipes for months.

"People like Daniel Pipes are dangerous and need to be identified for the bigots and warmongers they are," says a writer from Missouri.

"Pipes," writes another, "has been discriminatory against (anything) Muslim or Arab. He supported ‘unrestricted' profiling for Muslims and Arabs," says another. Another asks if Pipes' views remind us of "what happened over 60 years ago in the middle of the civilized world, in Germany?"

What has been published is nothing short of slander. I expect better from a paper that has won an Associated College Press Award twice in a row.[1] The DI editors have taken it upon themselves to ruin the reputation of Dr. Daniel Pipes. Consider this lengthy list of columns and letters:

· "Pipes against peace"

· "Pipes not an expert"

· "Pipes shouldn't be nominated"

· "Pipes: the wrong man"

· "Racism and Scholarship"

· "Say no to Pipes"

None of these letters are from Illinois and one is from as far away as California. The last one is particularly interesting. It is not a letter, but uses text that was directly lifted from a press release put out by the Council of American Islamic Relations, or CAIR, an organization that routinely defends Islamic violence.

How could The Daily Illini publish this? Both staff columnists writing on Dr. Pipes also quote sections verbatim from the CAIR website without any verification. This is particularly disturbing since CAIR's website is dangerously misleading and filled with fictional comments. And why would the editors not at least look at the other side of the argument? CAIR's entire position against Dr. Pipes is carefully and calmly refuted by Dr. Pipes himself on his own website, www.DanielPipes.org, should the truth be of any interest to the DI.

The Daily Illini stooped even lower after Dr. Pipes came to speak at the University. Before he had uttered a word, campus radicals already made their voice known, in the editorial today and two letters:

· "Expert spews hate"

· "Support speech that is not hateful"

These letters are incredibly disappointing. There is no need to compare Dr. Pipes to extremists. He is a distinguished academic. He boasts a Harvard Ph.D. in Islamic History, has taught at Harvard, University of Chicago and the Naval War College, studied and written on the Islamic world for thirty years and has written 12 books on the region, its culture and history.

It was Daniel Pipes who said, "militant Islam is the problem, and moderate Islam is the solution," and "the U.S. government should never fund a documentary whose obvious intent is to glorify a religion and proselytize for it. Doing so flies in the face of American tradition and law."

It was Daniel Pipes who argued that, "in brief, far from thinking the Palestinians a miserable people, I call attention to their dignity and talent, then propose how to liberate them from their demons so they can build a civil society and decent lives."

Rather than printing these statements, the DI chose to forward unsubstantiated propaganda of a political website as fact, and pair it with an insidious graphic of a Star of David drawn going up in flames.

What is Daniel Pipes' crime then? It is simply this: he recognizes that Islam is increasingly being hijacked by militants, or in his terms, Islamists. These Islamists stand against everything that The Daily Illini claims to defend: religious tolerance, equal rights, democracy, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly.

Daniel Pipes has never, in any way, called for blanket anti-Islamic action, but for an active assault against those elements of Islamic society that would install Taliban-like regimes around the world. He calls for America and its allies to defend themselves from this assault on freedom.

For those whose minds were not corrupted by CAIR propaganda, it is my hope that you might walk into his lecture with open minds. It is also my hope that the students of Illinois have not been corrupted by The Daily Illini, which claims to be an open forum, but performs as little more than as parrot for a grotesque political agenda.

ENDNOTES:

[1] http://www.studentpress.org/acp/winners/npm03.html

John Crace, writing in the Guardian (Dec. 9, 2003):

It's a Monday morning in Cambridge and Richard Evans shuffles out of the porter's lodge at Gonville & Caius College trailing a large suitcase behind him. "Been somewhere nice for the weekend?" I ask. Evans looks confused for a moment. "I haven't been anywhere," he eventually replies. "I've got someone flying in from the US to research the Irving trial and these are some of the documents."

The emphasis here should be on the "some". In the five years between 1995 and 2000 the standard bibliography of works on the Nazis increased from 25,000 to 37,000: the figure has no doubt grown still further since then, and Evans himself has to take his fair share of the credit. Or blame.

As professor of modern history at Cambridge and one of the country's leading experts on the Nazi period, he's generated several shelves of archives on his own - most notably as the star defence witness for Penguin books in the David Irving Holocaust denial libel trial in 2000. Indeed, the story of the publication of his book about the trial, Telling Lies about Hitler, produced its only mini sub-archive as first Heinemann, then Granta and finally Profile declined to publish it for various legal reasons, before Verso stepped in. "You can read all about it in Private Eye," he adds, a little testily.

And this month sees yet another addition to the Nazi canon as Evans publishes The Coming of the Third Reich, the first in a projected trilogy on Nazi Germany. So what more can be said on the subject? "It's precisely because the literature is so enormous, that I felt there was a need for a major overview and synthesis of the material," he argues. "Research has gone in three phases: in the 50s and 60s West German historians tried to understand how fascism arose from the Weimar democracy, then in the 70s and 80s historians worked on the structures of the Reich between 1933-39, and since the 90s the main focus has been the war and the Holocaust."

Evans's books will dovetail nicely with these three periods. The Coming of the Third Reich steers a comfortable middle-ground between the determinists, such as AJP Taylor, who reckon that Nazism was a historical inevitability for Germany ever since Luther drew his first breath and the only real surprise is that it didn't happen earlier, and those who see it as an aberration with no deep roots in German culture.

"The trouble with history is that you study it in reverse, so everything can appear to have an immediate cause and effect," he points out. "So while the driving force of Nazism can be seen as far back as Bismarck with the marginalisation of the Catholics and socialists together with the emergence of a nationalism based on Social Darwinism and eugenics, you can never say it was an inevitability. If German unification had taken place in a less authoritarian way, if the first world war had not taken place, if the Weimar constitution had been worded differently, if the Depression had not put one-third of the workforce out of a job and had Hindenburg not written off the Nazis as politically naive and compliant, then German history of the 30s and 40s might have looked very different."

Evans also has an implicit pop at modern academics, such as Michael Burleigh, for what he sees as a new trend for overwriting history as a series of moral judgments. "Of course a historian cannot avoid expressing certain values," he says. "It's clear from my own work that I believe in a multicultural democracy, but to go from that position to say someone is morally good or bad is either unnecessary or simplistic. The principle task of history is to explain and interpret, not to issue moral judgments."...

Towards the end of the 90s he took on the postmodernists and post-structuralists who were predicting the end of history as an academic discipline in his book In Defence of History. In it, he fought off suggestions that all history was a matter of a reader's interpretation, by asserting the right of the author to define the text. You get the feeling he bit off a little more than expected, as the book was attacked on two fronts - by the conservatives for being too quiescent to the wishy-washy liberals and by the postmodernists for being too reactionary.

"It was all good-natured stuff, really," he laughs. "The really nasty spats died out when dons stopped living in college, as the disputes tended to be more marital than academic."

Still, as ever, he came out fighting, quickly adding a 50-page afterword, reiterating and refining his position, for the paperback edition and, though he admits he wasn't as clear as he might have been in the original, he reckons he more than won the argument. "The postmodernists rather proved my point by complaining I had misrepresented what they had written and, far from dying out, history has gone from strength to strength."

Not that Evans believes all is well within the discipline. "When I came to Oxford in the late 60s you had to have studied Latin and at least one other modern language," he says. "Now there is no language requirement, and I worry for the state of British history if none of our academics of the future is able to study foreign sources. Already my PhD students are predominantly German as they are bilingual."

As professor of modern history at Cambridge for the last six years, and at Birkbeck for nine years before that, Evans acknowledges it is a long time since he came into contact with any average undergraduates. But he does feel that with history no longer compulsory at GCSE and with the A-level syllabus - in many people's view - extremely limited, many students have huge knowledge gaps. "It doesn't work to my advantage at all," he smiles. "Most of those who come up to Cambridge are sick and tired of learning about the Nazis and want to start afresh. I've only got four undergraduate students at the moment."

Thomas Spencer, writing in the Birmingham News (Dec. 22, 2003):

It's been a good year for University of Alabama history professor George Rable.

His book, "Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!," won the triple crown of Civil War book awards, the Douglas Southall Freeman Book Award and both the Jefferson Davis Award, presented bythe Museum of the Confederacy, and the prestigious Lincoln Prize, awarded by Gettysburg College. Only once before has a book won both the David and Lincoln prizes.

On top of that, Rable won the University of Alabama's top professor's prize.

"Your eminent colleagues at other universities believe you are one of the finest historians of the Civil War era and that your work will be cited a century from now," UA President Robert E. Witt wrote when notifying Rable. "You are a most deserving winner of the Blackmon-Moody Outstanding Professor Award."

In a nomination letter, James M. McPherson, widely considered one of the great Civil War scholars, wrote of Rable, "George is without question one of the finest historians in my field in this generation."

His students describe him as humble and approachable, but even Rable has to admit a touch of pride in winning that last compliment: "That felt pretty good coming from somebody like James McPherson. He was probably being a bit generous."

A native of Lima, in northwest Ohio, Rable, 53, was the first in his family to go to college. His father worked in a steam shovel factory, his mother in a school cafeteria. He thought he'd study math, but he took a couple of history courses and got hooked.

After earning his bachelor's at Bluffton College, a small liberal arts college in Ohio, he came south to Baton Rouge, earning doctoral and master's degrees from Louisiana State University.

He went north again and taught from 1979 to 1998 at Anderson University outside Indianapolis. During that time, he wrote three books: "The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against Politics," "Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism" and "But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction." He was well into writing "Fredericksburg" when he was recruited to the University of Alabama in 1998.

With the book, Rable wanted to do something that historians typically haven't done. He wanted to describe not only the battle, but also the larger universe in which it was fought.

"They do the battle histories and they do the homefront pieces," Rable said. "They haven't tried to put the things together."

Though it was considered a major engagement when fought, Fredericksburg hasn't received a lot of attention. It turned out to be a perfect battle for what Rable set out to do.

On December 11, Al-Jazeera's program"From Washington" held a discussion on Middle Eastern studies in the United States. Chief guest: Professor Rashid Khalidi , the newly-seated incumbent of the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at Columbia University, and director of that university's (government-subsidized) Middle East Institute. He said little that was original or surprising--until the end, when he blew a gasket and uttered the sort of thing he would only dare to say in Arabic.
It happened like this. At one point in the discussion, Khalidi criticized think tanks"that don't want true dialogue with people whose views differ from their own, but who want to force their opinions on American citizens and the world." He mentioned, by way of example, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy , which he labelled"the fiercest of the enemies of the Arabs and the Muslims."

The moderator, Hafiz al-Mirazi, played devil's advocate. Hadn't the Institute often hosted Arabs and others holding diverse views? It had provided a podium for Nabil Amr, Palestinian information minister, as well as Egyptian presidential adviser Osama al-Baz. Just recently, Washington Institute mainstay David Makovsky had written a joint op-ed with an Egyptian writer from Al-Ahram (the reference was to Dr. Hala Mustafa, a visiting fellow), on democracy promotion in the Arab world.

At this point, Khalidi boiled over:

This is the intimidating language of Arab boycott, aimed against an institution with entirely American credentials. The Washington Institute is directed by Ambassador Dennis Ross , who was the chief Middle East peace negotiator in the presidential administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He has always been a model of balance (unlike Khalidi, whose forays into politics have always been to advise Yasir Arafat). The Washington Institute is run by Americans, and accepts funds only from American sources. (Contrast with the donors of Khalidi's chair, whose precise identities Columbia still refuses to reveal.)

And it is outrageous for Khalidi to denounce the Arabs who have come to The Washington Institute as blundering dupes. I was there in the fall, when the Institute brought to Washington a group of Palestinian Fatah activists associated with the Tanzim (an invitation for which Ross took a lot of flak ). While in Washington, these Palestinians said things that could hardly be squared with"Zionist propaganda." Who is Khalidi to tell them they made a"huge error"? For its annual fall conference, the Institute flew in three members of Iraq's Governing Council, whose country would still be under Saddam's iron rule if Khalidi had had his way . Who is he to tell them they made a"huge error"? The year before last, my stay coincided with that of Ali Salem , the Egyptian playwright who has faced down Egypt's entire literary establishment, and who once was detained for his collaboration with democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim. Who in the world is Khalidi to tell him that he made a"huge error"? I doubt these steel-belted Arabs would ever allow themselves to be intimidated by a pampered prof enjoying the full Columbia treatment.

I note that Khalidi has never made a comparable statement in English, probably for this reason: it would damage his reputation as a bridge-building moderate. To maintain that image, he's even shared podiums with members of The Washington Institute (see his smiling mug, with David Makovsky). But Khalidi in Arabic, on Al-Jazeera, is someone else altogether. There he is the bridge-burner, the zealot who would warn other Arabs away from The Washington Institute because it is"Israeli," and a"Zionist propaganda tool." Behold, Arab-style McCarthyism.

Khalidi's crude outburst won't stop the caravan, but it does put yet another question mark alongside his name. I have never called him an apologist for terrorism, and I respect some of his historical scholarship. But I once heard him speak to a predominantly Arab audience, and it alarmed me. This latest statement confirms something I've suspected ever since: he isn't all he appears to be. Caveat emptor --buyer beware. (Too late for Columbia, but not for the rest of us.)

And speaking of Columbia, what has Khalidi done to promote what he calls"true dialogue" since his September enthronement in the Edward Said Chair? Two Israelis--academic post-Zionists-- spoke at his institute this past semester. He and they would have nodded in agreement over Israel's alleged misdeeds. I don't think that's good enough, and it leaves me wondering (again) why his institute gets what The Washington Institute doesn't get: a $400,000-a-year Title VI handout from the American taxpayer. It's a dubious mechanism that puts such a hefty subsidy at the disposal of an Arab boycotter. It really should be fixed.

Peter Maass writing in the NYT (Jan. 1, 2004):

Maj. John Nagl approaches war pragmatically and philosophically, as a soldier and a scholar. He graduated close to the top of his West Point class in 1988 and was selected as a Rhodes scholar. He studied international relations at Oxford for two years, then returned to military duty just in time to take command of a tank platoon during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, earning a Bronze Star for his efforts. After the war, he went back to England and earned his Ph.D. from St. Antony's College, the leading school of foreign affairs at Oxford . While many military scholars were focusing on peacekeeping or the impact of high-tech weaponry, Nagl was drawn to a topic much less discussed in the 1990's: counterinsurgency.

At Oxford , he immersed himself in the classic texts of guerrilla warfare. There are different schools of thought, but almost every work in the canon imparts the message that counterinsurgency is one of the hardest types of warfare to wage. Nagl read "Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice," by Col. C.E. Callwell, a British officer who in 1896 warned of "protracted, thankless, invertebrate war" in guerrilla terrain. Nagl also read "Small Wars Manual," published in 1940 by the United States Marine Corps, which cautions: "Every detachment representing a tempting target will be harassed or attacked. The population will be honeycombed with hostile sympathizers."

The more Nagl read, the more he understood the historical challenge of insurgency. Julius Caesar complained that his legions had trouble subduing the roving Britons because his men "were little suited to this kind of enemy." In the early 1800's, Carl von Clausewitz wrote of "people's wars" in which "the element of resistance will exist everywhere and nowhere." The book that most forcefully captured Nagl's imagination was written by T.E. Lawrence, popularly known as Lawrence of Arabia, the British officer who, during World War I, led Arab fighters against the Turkish rulers in the Middle East and described the campaign (taking liberties with the facts) in his counterinsurgency classic, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom."

Lawrence 's is one of the few books in the canon written from the point of view of the insurgent. (Another is Mao Zedong's "On Guerrilla Warfare.") In a near-hallucinatory state, suffering from dysentery and lying in a tent, Lawrence realized the key to defeating the Turkish Army. "Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head," he wrote. Lawrence 's guerrillas, by contrast, "might be a vapour." For the Turks, he concluded, "war upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife."

In his own research, Nagl focused on two modern insurgencies in Asia . In Malaya in the 1950's, the British successfully suppressed a Communist revolt (comprised mostly of ethnic Chinese) by generally steering clear of excessive force and instituting a "hearts and minds" campaign to strip the insurgents of public sympathy. In Vietnam in the 1960's and 1970's, the United States military took a different approach and failed. The Americans resorted to indiscriminate firepower and showed little concern for its effect on the civilian population. Comparing the two efforts, Nagl demonstrated that a key issue for a counterinsurgent army is to calibrate correctly the amount of lethal force necessary to do the job with the minimum amount of nasty, counterproductive side effects. Even if using force with restraint meant the mission would take more time or reduce the level of force protection, it was still an indispensable step: a successful counterinsurgency took care and patience. When Nagl's doctoral thesis, "Counterinsurgency Lessons From Malaya and Vietnam ," was published in 2002, it carried the subtitle "Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife."

Nagl's scholarship helped earn him a post as a professor at West Point . But when I met him last month, he was testing his theories far from the classroom. Nagl is now the third in command of a tank battalion in the heart of the so-called Sunni Triangle, which extends north and west of Baghdad . The counterinsurgency expert is, for the first time in his life, practicing counterinsurgency. ...

Writing more than a hundred years ago, C.E. Callwell, the British military historian , predicted in his classic text "Small Wars" a dilemma that would face every counterinsurgent force of the 20th century. "In a guerrilla situation," he warned, "the guerrilla is the professional, the newcomer the amateur." Callwell offered this remedy: "It cannot be insisted upon too strongly that in a small war the only possible attitude to assume is, speaking strategically, the offensive. The regular army must force its way into the enemy's country and seek him out. . . . It must play to win and not for safety. . . . It is not a question of merely maintaining the initiative, but of compelling the enemy to see at every turn that he has lost it and to recognize that the forces of civilization are dominant and not to be denied."

Callwell's solution tends to create a new problem, however. What is the right amount of offensive force to use? At the outset of the Vietnam War, Col. John Paul Vann, who would emerge as one of the most thoughtful and ultimately tragic officers in the war, recognized the paradox and realized his firepower-loving commanders had not. In 1962, he warned David Halberstam, then a young reporter for The New York Times, that the wrong strategy had been adopted. "This is a political war, and it calls for the utmost discrimination in killing," he told Halberstam, as recounted in William Prochnau's "Once Upon a Distant War." "The best weapon for killing is a knife, but I'm afraid we can't do it that way. The next best is a rifle. The worst is an airplane, and after that the worst is artillery. You have to know who you are killing."

Nagl, in his book, portrays Colonel Vann -- the protagonist of Neil Sheehan's Pulitzer-Prize-winning book "A Bright Shining Lie" -- as a clear-eyed officer who saw what was wrong and had the courage to say it out loud. Nagl understands the message Vann imparted to Halberstam and tried to impart to the generals he served under: counterinsurgency requires an excruciatingly fine calibration of lethal force. Not enough of it means you will cede the offensive to your enemy, yet too much means you will alienate the noncombatants whose support you need.