US Lt. Col. John A. Nagl has a Ph.D. from Oxford University and runs a blog he calls “Small Wars Journal.” But the Iraq War he serves, and its deadly, ever-increasing insurgency, is anything but small. The War is big and expensive, and on the eve of the upcoming election primaries, US President George W. Bush mutters about extending it to Iran because their boats got too close to our boats. The insurgency is big and growing, spanning mountain ranges and oceans, sects, classes and castes.

Prof. Marilyn Young has a Ph.D. from Harvard, teaches US foreign relations at New York University, and her opinions flatter neither Bush nor Nagl.

And, she and Nagle meet at the George H.W. Bush Library here at Texas A&M University. They each give a short lecture and then take questions from the audience, warily debating each other as they answer.

Nagl promotes the new US Army/Marine Corps. Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which contains insights gleaned from T.E. Lawrence, the famous British officer who led the 1916-18 Arab insurgency against the Turks. The modern Iraq insurgency, Nagle claims, must be fought for a long duration unlikely to end in most of our lifetimes, and on a massive scale unlike any seen before. It’s an “asymmetric,” untraditional, global war, and “we’ve got to get better at it,” he warns, quoting former A&M President Bob Gates, now US Secretary of Defense.

Nagl insists that no matter how imperfectly “American” the Iraqis supposedly are at soldiering and policing, America needs to let the Iraqis win their own war against the insurgents. “Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly,” he says Lawrence said.

Young says she admires Nagl’s admiration for Lawrence. But how can he miss the paradox, she wonders? “Lawrence saw himself as advising insurgent forces, rather than those who would destroy them,” she points out.

So if Lawrence were alive today, Lawrence would be...fighting with Al-Qaeda in Iraq?

“Perhaps,” Young nods sweetly. “It’s paradoxical.” And, Young adds, Nagl didn’t refer to the end of Lawrence’s quote, which cautioned the British: “Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.” Does that mean that Americans are overrating their own performance in Iraq?

Nagl claims the counterinsurgency manual he helped write creates new and improved ways to win Iraqi hearts and minds. Young glibly counters: “Someone famous once said, ‘Grab their balls, and their hearts and minds will follow.” But now, there’s a gleam in her eye.

“Can a bad war ever be fixed?” Young asks. The lawyer in me stirs, and I rewrite her sentence on my note pad: “Can an illegal war ever be fixed?”

And if the war is illegal, then under classical war doctrine, is the insurgency not only technically lawful, but the just and right thing for insurgents to do?

“We definitely need to bring the rest of our allies on board for the next military action,” Nagl answers someone in the audience. But isn’t the reason “our allies” didn’t join the United States’ “coalition of the willing” was because they believed we were acting illegally by starting the Iraq War in the first place?

Nagl and Young are both right, in their ways. Nagl correctly observes that winning the war in Iraq and defeating the insurgents will take more than bullets. Young thinks an admission of wrongdoing, coupled with reparations for the illegal war, might calm Iraqi insurgents.

Paying to rebuild Iraq, paying people for their homes being destroyed, lives being ruined and lost, well, is there enough money anywhere for that?

Perhaps that’s not really the point. “If Americans have to pay for their wrongdoing,” she smiles enigmatically, “they won’t let the politicians do it again.” And acknowledgment that the Iraq war was wrongful from its inception will go a long way toward giving the insurgency no place to go. Another line from Lawrence springs into my mind: “A bad start [with Arabs] is difficult to atone for.”

But each presidential administration is a new beginning.