When students and liberals initially occupied Tahrir Square, it looked like it might be a passing thing.

War is not a petri dish to examine and analyze our emotions.

The U.S. presence and American missteps made ethnic violence in Iraq far worse than it would have been otherwise after Saddam Saddam Hussein's fall.

Foreigners who speak Arabic in the Middle East are often assumed to be working for the C.I.A. or Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad.

An Egyptian newspaper once publicly identified me as the C.I.A. station chief in Cairo. It seemed so stupid at the time. I was only 24, a little young to be a station chief, and, of course, I was never with the C.I.A.

I had some training on how to cope with hostage-taking.

After literally hundreds of firefights, Chosen Company became increasingly battle-hardened. And they also became increasingly suspicious of their Afghan counterparts, believing - with their lives on the line at the end of the day - that they could only truly rely on themselves.

Everyone knows what can happen to soldiers who are in front line units.

By 2007, Iraqi society had completely collapsed.