Peter Bergen

And I love his commentaries. Here are the main points taken straight out of the article:
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/01/09/bergen.war.obama/index.html
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First, the United States must lower the temperature in the Muslim world to help win back the "swing voters" in the Islamic world who turned against America and provide passive support to al Qaeda.

A second strategic doctrine should be: first, do no harm. Its rationale lies in the several major strategic weaknesses from which al Qaeda and its associated groups suffer.

The third doctrine is to disaggregate our enemies. The United States must not fall into bin Laden's rhetorical trap of believing there is a monolithic global jihadist militant movement united against it. The United States should be splintering, buying off and co-opting its enemies -- the kind of policy that severely damaged al Qaeda in Iraq.

The fourth doctrine is to approach the war on al Qaeda and allied groups as a global counterinsurgency campaign, something that thoughtful students of the global war on terror like the Australian anthropologist/infantry officer Lt. Col. David Kilcullen and Bruce Hoffman, the dean of terrorism studies, have advocated for years.

Finally, promoting more open societies in the Muslim world will undermine the jihadist terrorists. It is no accident that so many members of jihadist terror organizations come from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria and Egypt -- countries ruled by authoritarian regimes.

Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst and a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington and at New York University's Center on Law and Security. His most recent book is "The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader." This is the second of two commentaries on the war on terror. Read the first piece here