LAST WEEK the Washington Post featured a story on Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, the Spanish-Syrian al Qaeda strategist who wrote the 1,600 page Call for a Global Islamic Resistance. The Post story provided a revealing look at Nasar who, despite his capture, remains the leading ideological architect of al Qaeda's war against the United States. But the Post also missed a number of important points in Nasar's career.

An Omission of Note

Supporters of the war have engaged in a vigorous debate, in these pages and elsewhere, about how better to fight this war. It would be encouraging if more people at senior levels of the military seemed to be engaged in this kind of serious thinking and rethinking. It would be encouraging if more civilians high up in the Pentagon were engaged in such a debate. It would be encouraging if a single person in the White House seemed to be engaged in a real effort to learn from mistakes, so as to adjust our policy to make success more likely.

Haditha Handwringing

"Afghanistan is the sleeper crisis of this summer."

The number of roadside bombs is up 30 percent over a year ago, with insurgents getting designs off the Internet.

"Has Pakistan done enough? I think the answer is no.

"I'm more concerned in the long term about the results of the drug war in Afghanistan than I am about resurgent Taliban," said the NATO military commander. The government and its NATO allies have not lost the people yet, officials say. But it is getting close to that."

Springtime for Killing in Afghanistan

Sunni forces working for the Ministry of Defense who were supposed to be guarding Iraq's oil pipeline were instead freelancing as death squads, assassinating people who cooperated with the same government that paid the gunmen's salaries.

The Price of Iraq

PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD of Iran wrote a letter to President Bush last weekend — the first formal letter from an Iranian leader to an American president since Iran's Islamic revolution of 1979. The letter has a familiar ring. In tone and structure, it is eerily reminiscent of a letter sent in January 1989 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of Iran's revolution, to Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the leader of a collapsing Soviet Union.

This might be of interest to those who blogged about the recent letter.

From Iran, With Something Less Than Love

Mr. Bush has spent three years in a futile effort to establish a strong central government in Baghdad, leaving us without a real political settlement, with a deteriorating security situation—and with nothing but the most difficult policy choices. The five-point alternative plan offers a plausible path to that core political settlement among Iraqis, along with the economic, military and diplomatic levers to make the political solution work. It is also a plausible way for Democrats and Republicans alike to protect our basic security interests and honor our country’s sacrifices.

Unity Through Autonomy in Iraq, by Joe Biden and Leslie Gelb | Council on Foreign Relations

Bush's CIA chief abruptly resigns under a shadow of alleged ties to a corrupt congressman and leaves a spy agency in chaos.

Porter Goss' spooky demise

Thanks to our super-secret source for telling us about this ABC feed that got posted, with a camera trained on the President Bush during Colbert's video skit during last week's White House correspondents' dinner.

The president is not amused

Perhaps this shrinking of the CIA is necessary if the agency has become as politicized and ungovernable as it sometimes seems from the outside. In that case, Mr. Bush would be better off shutting Langley altogether and rebuilding an intelligence service from the ground up under the DNI. This being Washington, where inertia rules, that isn't likely to happen. So we are probably left with the hope that Mr. Bush will choose a new director who can work with Mr. Negroponte to make the agency more effective.

Given the way Mr. Goss was roughed up, despite having worked at the CIA himself as a younger man, Mr. Bush shouldn't acquiesce and pick a Langley insider. We'd recommend Rudy Giuliani or Paul Wolfowitz, assuming either would take the job. Or better yet, make one of those two the DNI, and move Mr. Negroponte over to CIA. That would get everyone's attention, especially al Qaeda's.

Gossed Over

Now, "the real battle lies between" Negroponte and Rumsfeld, said retired Army Lt. Gen. Donald Kerrick, a former deputy national security adviser and once a senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

"Rumsfeld rules the roost now."

The Fix-It Man Leaves, but The Agency's Cracks Remain