Filed at 10:06 a.m. ET

Freezing temperatures hit northern Florida on Monday morning and snow made mountain highways treacherous in the Appalachians as the first big cold wave of the season swept southward.

Even North Carolina’s Outer Banks got a rare seaside dusting of snow, and more than 2 feet fell near the Great Lakes.

The blast of Arctic air — one day before the official start of winter — drove temperatures in the Florida Panhandle down to 31 degrees at Crestview, 32 at Pensacola.

The Florida citrus industry had no major worries because damage is seen only when readings stay at 28 or lower for at least four hours. But meteorologists warned that frost was possible Monday night and Tuesday morning even in central and southern Florida’s fruit and vegetable growing regions.

Greensboro, N.C., posted a record low for Dec. 20 at 9, and Crossville, Tenn., dropped to 6. Farther north, it was 18 below zero at 9 a.m. at Massena, N.Y., with a wind chill of 28 below, the National Weather Service said.

Homeless shelters were near capacity in Atlanta — where the temperature dropped to 16 — and were busy even in the suburbs where the homeless population is not as high.

“When weather gets this bitterly cold, we see faces we rarely see,” said Tyler Driver, executive director of The Extension, an emergency shelter for the homeless in Marietta, Ga.

As much as 4 inches of snow coated mountain roads in West Virginia, where 21 school districts closed for the day and others opened late.

“This last day of fall certainly doesn’t feel like it,” said Ken Batty, a meteorologist in Charleston, W.Va.

Parts of New England also had blowing snow, and more than 130 schools closed or had delayed openings in New Hampshire.

An autistic 9-year-old boy was missing in the woods near South Williamsport, Pa., where temperatures fell into the single digits during the night. Officials appealed to residents to search their property Monday for Logan Mitcheltree, who was last seen Saturday.

“There’s a possibility; there’s always hope,” Deputy Fire Chief John West said.

Icy pavement was blamed for at least two traffic deaths in New Jersey.

The icy wind sucked up moisture from the Great Lakes and dumped 26 inches of snow on Michigan City in northern Indiana. The city’s schools were closed Monday.

Bonnie and Jim Tilden got stranded Sunday near Rolling Prairie, Ind. “It was terrible on I-94. You couldn’t see at all, and we didn’t see any snowplows,” Bonnie Tilden said.

Blowing snow caused whiteout conditions in western Pennsylvania, and a tractor-trailer jackknifed across Interstate 80, setting off a chain-reaction pileup that wrecked up to 80 vehicles.

“I could hear the cars piling into each other for a good 10 minutes,” said state Trooper Ted Hunt, who was attending to disabled vehicles on the side of the highway when the collisions started Sunday.

his article was reported by Barry Meier, Gina Kolata and Andrew Pollack and written by Mr. Meier.

In the mid-1990′s, the medical community reached an inescapable conclusion. Researchers at the Stanford University Medical School and elsewhere who had long been monitoring arthritis and rheumatism patient records had found that thousands of patients, perhaps as many as 16,500, were dying annually from bleeding ulcers and other problems caused by widely used painkillers like ibuprofen.

Within a few years, a new class of pain relievers, the so-called COX-2 inhibitors, burst onto the market with the promise they might reduce that toll. Sales of the best known products, Celebrex and Vioxx, quickly skyrocketed – thanks in part to changes in federal rules in 1997 that made it much easier for drug makers to advertise medications directly to consumers on television, in newspapers and in magazines.

Now, though, the flight path of these blockbuster drugs has been aborted. On Friday, Pfizer the maker of Celebrex, which is expected to end up with sales of $3.3 billion this year, disclosed that a patient trial by the National Cancer Institute had found significant risks of heart attacks. Vioxx, which was made by Merck and had sales of $2.5 billion last year, was pulled from the market in late September after similar findings.

In some ways, the story of the COX-2 drugs, a class that includes another troubled Pfizer medication, Bextra, is part of an age-old search for safer pain treatments. And some doctors say that they have helped. But it is also perhaps the clearest instance yet of how the confluence of medicine and marketing can turn hope into hype – and how difficult it is for the Food and Drug Administration to monitor the safety of drugs after they have been approved for the market. Celebrex and Vioxx, after fast-track approval from the F.D.A., hit the nation’s pharmacies as revolutionary drugs that could not only treat arthritis patients’ pain, but potentially save their lives.

But having spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop their drugs, the makers of Celebrex and Vioxx, cheered on by Wall Street, had every motivation to expand their markets beyond the older people most at risk of ulcers to encourage the drugs’ use by millions more people of all ages. That was so even as, at least in the case of Vioxx, there was evidence as early as 2000 that a COX-2 drug could cause heart problems.

“You have to realize that these medications, they are not candies, they are not placebos,” said Dr. Gurkirpal Singh, a Stanford professor who has worked on the arthritis database project. A big problem with the COX-2 drugs, he said, has been the tendency of doctors to use them indiscriminately. “Like all medications, you have to identify which people will benefit the most, and which won’t.”

Since the drugs’ release, the companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on television, newspaper and magazine advertising for them and, by some estimates, at least as much on marketing and promoting the drugs to doctors. As a result, many medical experts now say that Celebrex and Vioxx, selling for $2 or $3 a pill, have been too widely prescribed to patients who could safely obtain the same pain benefits from over-the-counter drugs costing pennies apiece.

Potentially wasted money, though, is not the main point about the sales push, now that there is clinical evidence that all the COX-2 drugs on the market can, in some circumstances, increase a user’s likelihood of strokes or heart attacks.

On Friday, Pfizer characterized the cancer trial findings as an anomaly requiring further study and said it was not ready to withdraw the drug. But the news of the trial results was enough to send drug stocks plummeting and to cast grave doubts on the future of the entire COX-2 drug category. Only a few weeks ago, the F.D.A. ordered Pfizer to put a label warning on Bextra, noting that it could pose cardiac risks to patients recovering from heart surgery.

Pfizer and Merck have repeatedly said that their marketing has been accurate and responsible. “We market all of our medicines consistent with regulation,” said a spokeswoman for Pfizer. “Doctors and patients are in the best position to say which drugs are most appropriate for them.”

But the rapid rise and now shaky future of this class of drugs, some researchers say, is emblematic of the way drug companies’ efforts to spur the use of costly new medicines can distort the medical realities of safety and effectiveness.

Too often, marketing can drown out medical science, said Dr. James F. Fries, the director for the Stanford arthritis database project, which receives funding from the National Institutes of Health. “Here, it was not a fair battle.”

The roots of Celebrex and Vioxx reach back to the early 1990′s. At the time, Harvey R. Herschman and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles were screening large numbers of genes trying to find ones that might be involved in cancer. The screen turned up a gene that was in many ways similar to a known gene for an enzyme called cyclooxygenase or COX.

It had long been understood that COX spurred the production in the body of chemicals called prostaglandins that contributed to pain, inflammation and fever. But it had always been thought that there was only one COX enzyme. Now in Dr. Herschman’s laboratory emerged evidence of a new one, which came to be called COX-2. Similar discoveries were made about the same time in the laboratories of Donald A. Young at the University of Rochester and Daniel L. Simmons at Brigham Young University.

“It was totally unexpected, completely serendipitous,” Dr. Herschman said of his own discovery, adding that he believed that to be true of the other labs as well.

But the implications were immediately clear to Philip Needleman, who had already hypothesized the existence of a second COX enzyme and had begun to characterize its role in the body. The original COX, now called COX-1, seemed to be present everywhere in the body and contributed to vital functions like protecting the stomach lining. COX-2 seemed to be present mostly during times of inflammation. So if a drug could be made to block COX-2 but not COX-1, the thinking went, it could relieve pain without causing ulcers.

Convinced of the importance of the discovery, Dr. Needleman had moved from Washington University in St. Louis to Monsanto in 1989 to lead an all-out effort to develop a COX-2 inhibitor. The result of Dr. Needleman’s effort was celecoxib, or Celebrex. Monsanto’s drug division, Searle, eventually was acquired by Pharmacia, which in turn was gobbled up by Pfizer, in a rush of mergers that swept the drug industry over the past decade to satisfy Wall Street’s desire for rapid growth.

Thinking that Celebrex and Vioxx would help cut the rate of gastrointestinal bleeding, the F.D.A. took only six months to review the applications for both drugs, an accelerated process used only for drugs deemed medically important. But in both cases, the F.D.A. decided that the drugs had not sufficiently demonstrated that they reduced the rate of serious gastrointestinal problems compared with existing painkillers like aspirin and ibuprofen. So the drugs’ labels contained the same warnings as the older drugs about such side effects.

Merck later conducted studies that persuaded the F.D.A. to change the label, but Pfizer’s results were never convincing enough for the agency to remove the warning from Celebrex’s labeling. In other words, the world’s best-selling COX-2 has never been proven to the F.D.A.’s satisfaction to have the stomach-protecting benefits that originally were supposed to be the point of that category of drugs.

By the time they reached the market, the COX-2 drugs were marketed by makers as not simply improved versions of older treatments but as entirely new drugs.

“They wanted to use this as a discontinuity with the past,” said Dr. Fries, the Stanford professor.

The audience also went beyond those at the highest risk of stomach bleeding – principally people over 65 years who have suffered from gastrointestinal problems or might be at risk for them.

Dorothy Hamill, the 1976 Olympic figure skating gold medalist, was the middle-aged celebrity face of Vioxx. Television commercials for Celebrex presented actors engaged in activities like riding bicycles and performing tai chi to the strains of the song “Celebrate” by the 1970′s band Three Dog Night. The song’s choice echoed more than the drug’s name; it was also selected to appeal to a critical audience, baby boomers beginning to suffer from arthritis.

Celebrex has been one of the most heavily promoted prescription drugs in advertising aimed at consumers. For the first nine months of this year, Pfizer spent almost $71.2 million on Celebrex, up about 55 percent from almost $46.1 million spent in the same period a year ago, according to data from the research firm TNS Media Intelligence/CMR. The effect of such advertising, many doctors say, was to drive to consumer demand for COX-2 drugs far beyond the bulk of those patients who really benefit from them.

Dr. Elizabeth Tindall, the president of the American College of Rheumatology, a professional group, said her group believed that COX-2′s are an appropriate treatment for patients at high risk of stomach problems. But “we weren’t saying to anyone if you have a 23-year-old with ankle pain put them on this drug,” said Dr. Tindall, who practices in Portland, Ore. “That was the impression that the TV advertising was giving.”

Within little more than a year, the drugs had grabbed about 40 percent of the market from traditional anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen. Some efforts were made to determine who would most benefit from the drugs. Researchers at Stanford developed a scoring tool that physicians could use to determine, based on a patient’s age and medical history, whether they were at high risk for stomach bleeding and, as a result, candidates for drugs like Celebrex and Vioxx.

Dr. Singh, the Stanford professor, said that most patients did not fall in the high-risk category.

Few groups or individuals, however, used the scoring tool. One organization that did was Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation’s largest health care systems. Dr. David Campen, a medical director at Kaiser, said that because of the scoring system only about 5 percent of Kaiser’s patients received a COX-2.

Beyond their heavily promoted use as prescription-strength painkillers, COX-2′s have been extensively studied for other potential uses, like fighting or even preventing cancer. And, perhaps ironically for the drug companies, it was cancer prevention studies that ultimately provided clinical evidence that Vioxx and Celebrex posed cardiac risks.

For years scientists have pursued evidence that aspirin-like drugs may help control the occurrence of polyps in people at risk of colon cancer. But there was a problem with testing such drugs as cancer preventatives in healthy people: the drugs could cause ulcers and bleeding.

So when Vioxx and Celebrex were developed as drugs that might act like aspirin, without the risks of bleeding, cancer researchers saw their chance. In fact, based on tests Searle had conducted with the National Cancer Institute, the F.D.A. approved Celebrex for patients at high-risk of getting colon cancer.

By last year, more than a dozen studies of Vioxx and Celebrex were under way with people at high risk for cancers of the lung, breast, skin, prostate, colon, mouth, bladder or esophagus. They were being studied along with standard treatments in patients who already had cancer.

The trials that disclosed the dangers involved healthy people who had already had polyps removed from their colons and who were randomly assigned to take a placebo or a COX-2 inhibitor. Each study sought to learn if taking a COX-2 inhibitor prevented the subsequent formation of polyps.

That answer is not yet known and the researchers have not released those data. But in both studies, the participants taking the COX-2 inhibitor had more heart attacks and strokes than those taking a placebo. The problem was seen in the Vioxx trial after 18 months and after a longer period in the Celebrex trial among patients taking high doses.

For all their early promise, the future of COX-2′s is uncertain.

Dr. Lester Crawford, the F.D.A.’s acting commissioner, said Friday that doctors should consider switching their Celebrex patients to other drugs. He said the F.D.A. had “great concerns” about Celebrex and Pfizer’s Bextra and was considering regulatory measures that could include forcing Celebrex’s withdrawal or placing severe warnings on its label.

Merck has a successor to Vioxx, called Arcoxia, pending approval at the F.D.A. But the agency, which has a panel planning to hold hearings on the entire class of drugs early next year, has tabled that application for now.

Some physicians, like Dr. Tindall, the rheumatologist in Portland, said they were concerned that if Celebrex or Bextra, or perhaps both, were withdrawn from the market that some patients who need such drugs will not get them. Indeed, many former Vioxx patients have complained about the withdrawal of that drug, saying it was the only pain medication that worked for them.

As it turns out, deaths and hospitalizations from stomach problems related to the use of ibuprofen and aspirin peaked in 1992 and had already dropped significantly before the appearance of Celebrex and Vioxx, according to data collected by Stanford University. In 1999, the year of the two drugs introductions, those problems also had another sharp decline.

Dr. Fries of Stanford said the drop-off over the past decade reflected, among other things, the use of lower doses of various painkillers. There has also been growing use of less toxic ones, not only COX-2′s but other medications, like Mobic, that other drug makers began to sell in response to concerns about stomach bleeding. Many doctors also have patients taking medications like Prilosec to offset the stomach irritation of some painkillers.

In terms of stomach bleeding, the relative risks of some other less irritating painkillers like Mobic appear indistinguishable from COX-2′s, Dr. Fries said. But because of the expense and difficulty of conducting broad-based clinical trials, there have been no studies comparing those drugs with one another and with the COX-2′s.

Dr. Fries said the story of the COX-2′s was emblematic of the consumer marketing forces that now propel the drug industry.

It is a market, he said, in which the lure of the new can run ahead of science.

“You have to have a new generation of drugs,” said Dr. Fries. And under that model, “the old ones are dangerous, and the new ones are safe.” Or until proven otherwise.

Stuart Elliott contributed reporting for this article.

ne of the first sex scandals of the blogosphere ended, of course, in a book deal. In May, Ana Marie Cox, the Internet gossip whose Web log, Wonkette, focuses on Washington, published a link to another blogger who called herself the Washingtonienne. In the blog, Washingtonienne, a Capitol Hill employee, used a Senate computer to post intimate details about her experience sleeping with six different men, some of whom were paying for her favors. Washingtonienne listed her partners by their initials and occupations, from the married ”Chief of Staff at one of the gov agencies, appointed by Bush” to her current boyfriend, a fellow Senate staff member. Praising Washingtonienne for her candor and honesty (”You go, girl!”), Wonkette identified her as Jessica Cutler, a 26-year-old mail sorter for Senator Mike DeWine, an Ohio Republican, who promptly fired her from her $25,000-a-year job. After a flurry of interviews in the newspapers and on TV, she sold a novel based on her blog to Hyperion for a figure that Wonkette estimated at $300,000. Cutler’s agent announced that she would pose nude for Playboy but would not talk to the media until the book was published. Her privacy, after all, had to be respected.

The men whose initials Cutler posted were not so lucky. In an effort to identify the Bush appointee who was paying for sex, Wonkette posted pictures of 13 chiefs of staff at federal agencies under the headline, ”Would You Sell Sex to This Man?” One of the suspects was a law-school classmate of mine, Frank Jimenez, who had recently served as chief of staff at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. When I saw the photo, I wondered if his career was over. Happily, the following day, Jimenez was completely exonerated by Wonkette: Cutler’s ”F” was married, while Jimenez was single. But during those hours of uncertainty, Jimenez experienced the peculiar anxiety of being falsely implicated in someone else’s Internet exhibitionism. ”I went to the gym during lunch, and when I came back, there were e-mails and voice mails from concerned friends,” he said. ”I was amazed at how many friends were following the story in real time, like a cyber soap opera.” Jimenez, who said he was never so glad to be single in his life, added, ”I would hope that bloggers would be more circumspect about what they post on the Web: it’s no different than old-fashioned gossip spread by word of mouth, but modern technology has magnified its impact a millionfold, and it’s potentially more harmful because of its permanence.”

As Web logs proliferate — Technorati, which tracks 5 million blogs, estimates that 15,000 are added each day — the boundaries between public and private are being transformed. Unconstrained by journalistic conventions, bloggers are blurring the lines between public events and ordinary social interactions and changing the way we date, work, teach and live. And as blogs continue to proliferate, citizens will have to develop new understandings about what parts of our lives are on and off the record.

In 1890, when Louis Brandeis, the future Supreme Court justice, and Samuel Warren, his former law partner, wrote their famous article on the right to privacy, they worried that the press and the camera were threatening the privacy of daily life. In the age of blogs, all citizens, no matter how obscure, will have to adjust their behavior to the possibility that someone may be writing about them.

There are as many different kinds of blogs as there are human impulses — sex blogs, dating blogs, political blogs, technology blogs and music blogs. But 70 to 80 percent are varieties of personal journals. A few have broken into the Technorati Top 100: for example, dooce, No. 39, advertises herself as ”that girl who lost her job” and ”managed to alienate her family because of her Web site.” (You can click the links to read the nasty things she said about her parents and colleagues that got her into trouble.) Although men and women blog in roughly equal numbers, personal bloggers are more likely to be women than men. And the favorite topic of personal bloggers is sex.

The founding father of personal bloggers may be Justin Hall, who started his Web site, Links.net, 10 years ago when he was a student at Swarthmore. ”When I first started doing it, they called it a personal home page; then they said I’m one of the first Web diarists, and now I’m one of the first Web bloggers,” he said. Hall’s short biography says that he is enrolled as a graduate student in interactive media at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television. But if you follow the links to his unofficial biography, you will learn much, much more about him — more than 4,800 pages of postings, in fact. You will learn about his relationship with his father (”When I was 8, my father, an alcoholic, killed himself”), his stepfather (”the intense difficulty we had getting to know each other was perhaps inevitable”) and his high-school friends. You will see photographs posted from his travels around the world and read his daily thoughts on ”art, writing, science, eating disorders, African-American religions and tai chi.” But, as Hall notes, ”the most popular subject is sex.” Here the links provide a great deal of personal information. Follow the link to ”looking for love,” and you will find Hall’s sexual biography, which includes a cumulative tally of ”Various Romantic Partners (Spring 1992 – Present) — Penetrative sex with a total of 26 people, ranging in age from 16 to 38. Fifteen of these exchanges were one-evening insertions.” At least one of these exchanges culminated in a sexually transmitted disease. (Click the link for details.)

Hall takes notes on his mobile phone, a Trio 650 with a camera, and he often posts photographs directly to the Web in real time. This gives his journal, at its best, the immediacy of a gonzo documentary, but it also runs the risk of upsetting people whose names or photos appear in his journal without their consent. As his blog has become more widely read, Hall says, former girlfriends have asked him to remove their names because they fear professional consequences if a Google search revealed their previous association with such a racy character. When one former girlfriend, with whom he lived for four years, asked him to remove her from the site, he replied: ”This is my art. I’ll remove specific things that bother you, but I can’t go through the entire Web site and remove every mention of your name.”

As personal blogging proliferates, an etiquette is beginning to emerge. In a forthcoming study of nearly 500 bloggers and their expectations of privacy by Fernanda Viegas of M.I.T., more than a third of the respondents said they had ”gotten in trouble” for material posted on their blog, and a third knew other bloggers who had gotten into trouble with family and friends. Those who wrote frequently about ”highly personal materials” got into trouble most often of all.

When Viegas asked bloggers to give her examples of the trouble their blogs had caused, she received responses like this: ”I lost a prospective girlfriend, who found that I’d blogged a brief amount about our date,” wrote one blogger. Nearly two-thirds of the bloggers told Viegas they almost never asked permission before blogging about other people by name, but bloggers who got into trouble said they became more sensitive to the importance of using pseudonyms after their friends and family objected.

The most popular personal journal sites, like LiveJournal.com (which has more than two million active users and nearly 400 posts a minute), allow bloggers to restrict access to a preselected audience. Nevertheless, most of the dating bloggers I talked to preferred to vent anonymously before unseen strangers because they viewed their sites as a form of personal therapy. Consider ”the Jewish American Warrior Princess,” whose anonymous blog styles itself ”a confessional of hope and vulgarity” dedicated to ”the nitty-gritty of dating and sex in Manhattan.” In a recent post, Warrior Princess confessed that she hadn’t ”had sex in over a year” or ”gone on a date in almost three months.” She said that she avoids mentioning the blog to potential dates because many people react badly to it. In the blogging world, however, anonymous strangers relate to her stories of dating woe and e-mail her to express solidarity. Other dating bloggers report similar feedback when they discuss common experiences that readers can relate to. ”I’ll admit that certain things drive me crazy, like my boyfriend going to a strip club, and then 20 girls will e-mail and say, ‘Oh, my God, it drives me crazy, too!”’ says a dating blogger named Deb who blogs as Smitten (at thesmitten.com).

Dating bloggers like Warrior Princess say they get several hundred hits a day and dozens of e-mail messages a week, and they find the emotional support from strangers to be comforting. But their blogs have not yielded lots of dates, in part because potential boyfriends are understandably wary about having their most intimate behaviors broadcast to the world. In the blogging community itself, there is a general consensus that dating fellow bloggers is crazy. ”Dating a blogger: quite frankly, I wouldn’t do it,” wrote Jessica on the Blog of Chloe and Pete. ”Dating writers is hard enough,” she continued, noting that Tolstoy’s marriage almost broke up after he shared with his virgin bride his diaristic accounts of liaisons with servant girls. ”And that was a private drama. Imagine enacting such a dysfunctional ritual online.”

The dating bloggers who are bold enough to date one another are indeed learning to negotiate complicated protocols about what parts of their life are on and off the record. The Tracy and Hepburn of the dating blog set may be Smitten and her boyfriend, Alex, who has blogged as Business Casual. They have inspired envy in the blogosphere for having met through their separate dating blogs. Deb started her blog in the summer of 2003, after a series of ”laughably bad” dates. She generally wrote about her partners anonymously, except in cases where they behaved badly, when she would shame them by using their first names. ”If you’re a bad date, you have no right to privacy; that’s Debbie’s law,” she said with a chuckle. Starting with seven readers on her first day, she was soon getting up to 900 hits a day. Then she met Alex.

”We actually met through our sites,” she said. ”It was Sept. 11, 2003, and I remember waking up thinking I’d really like to go for a drink, but none of my friends were around. I saw on his site that he really wanted to go for a drink. He said, I’ll be at this bar if anyone wants to stop by.”

Said Alex: ”Debbie sent me an e-mail and said, in effect, I’ll meet you there. It was definitely flattering.”

You can read about the meeting on her blog, as well as tracking the progress of their relationship. At first, Deb continued to date several men at the same time, enumerating each of their strengths and weaknesses, but after what Deb recalls as a messy beginning, she broke up with Alex a month later. Then, as she recorded on her blog at the time, she found herself missing Alex while making out with another man. After blogging her guilt, she called Alex to apologize, and they moved in together soon after.

Deb has continued to blog her feelings during their cohabitation — an exercise that, as you can imagine, sometimes leads to tensions. ”We used to joke in the beginning about things being on or off the record,” Deb said. ”This was something we bickered about all the time — I can’t let him read something before I post it. It’s like having someone reading over your shoulder, and I don’t like people to read my rough drafts.”

Not all blog gossip is about sex, of course — or only about sex. As blogs expand, people will need to develop new social conventions to resurrect the boundaries between public and private interactions. Consider law professors, in whose privacy I take a special interest. There is a growing category of blogs, known as blawgs, in which law students across the country record their musings about their daily experiences in law schools. (The legally inclined Web ring now has about 450 members.) Professors have always had to assume the risk that performance in class will be publicly evaluated: a Web site called RateMyProfessors.com posts anonymous rankings of teachers across the country.

But unlike course-evaluation sites, many blawgs focus on far more than their teachers’ public performances: they are essentially gossip sheets in which anonymous students transcribe conversations in and out of class with their professors and fellow students. For example, a blawg called Open and Notorious posted by students at a Washington law school was taken down after it posted graphic transcripts of conversations between professors and sycophantic students, as well as speculation about who was sleeping with whom.

At the law school where I teach, George Washington, I recently discovered that there are two anonymous student-run blawgs, Ambivalent Imbroglio and Life, Law, Libido. One includes photos and gossip items about student sex scandals, like the Capitol Hill intern (yes, another one) who broke up with one of his co-interns and then sent her a scathing e-mail message. The bloggers also include verbatim transcripts of their conversations with my colleagues not only in class but during office hours, augmented by unkind (if sometimes wickedly accurate) comments.

Now that I know that students may be reporting my after-class comments without my knowledge, I’m more likely to be circumspect in private conversations. Do I have any other remedies? One possibility might be to announce at the beginning of each term that all comments in the classroom are off the record to bloggers. But this kind of strategy is likely to backfire. In an Internet law class at Yale Law School, for example, Reed Hundt, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, agreed to speak on the condition that no news media be invited; during his talk, he discovered that student bloggers were enrolled in the class and asked them not to blog his remarks. This had the effect of enraging the bloggers, who insisted that they hadn’t agreed not to blog in advance and had a First Amendment right to blog whatever they liked. (Prof. Al Gore made the same mistake when he unwisely tried to block the media from one of his classes at the Columbia Journalism School.)

”Once burned, twice shy,” Hundt said, reflecting about his experience. ”I no longer try in any group larger than two or three people to establish any rules of confidentiality at all: what are you going to do, ask people to sign pieces of paper?” Hundt said he has abandoned the idea that he can control his audiences and assumes that everything he says might be posted. But in a small act of revenge, he has started an anonymous blog of his own. ”It’s in the nature of a private diary, but to tell you more would compromise its anonymity,” he said coyly.

There are two obvious differences between bloggers and the traditional press: unlike bloggers, professional journalists have a) editors and b) the need to maintain a professional reputation so that sources will continue to talk to them. I’ve been a journalist for more than a decade, and on two occasions I asked acquaintances whether I could print information that they had told me in social situations. Both times, they made clear that if I published they would never speak to me again. Without a reputation for trustworthiness, neither friendship nor journalism can be sustained over time.

Now that everyone is at risk of blogging or being blogged, what recourse do we have against unscrupulous bloggers? Nearly 60 percent of the bloggers in Viegas’s M.I.T. study said they thought they were potentially liable to be sued for materials published on their blog. And if Jessica Cutler’s boyfriend sues the Internet gossip sites that revealed his name and posted his picture, he might have a decent chance of winning. Like other journalists, bloggers can be sued for disclosing true details of someone else’s private life, as long as the disclosures ”would be highly offensive to a reasonable person” and ”not of legitimate concern to the public.” Cutler’s boyfriend was a private figure, and it’s certainly arguable that the disclosures about his sexual habits were highly offensive. Still, anyone in the boyfriend’s position would have to weigh the benefits of a lawsuit against its costs. A lawsuit would only bring him more unwanted publicity.

If suing unscrupulous bloggers isn’t a realistic option for most people, shaming them might be. ”Maybe it shouldn’t be the victim who bears the burden of punishing the person who does wrong; maybe the blogging community should take responsibility,” said Lawrence Lessig, the cyberspace scholar who blogs at Lessig.org. ”In my blog, when people make rude and inappropriate comments, people say, ‘Don’t feed the troll in blog space,’ and that’s a good response — the community shaming the person who is misbehaving.”

Other countries have experienced the effectiveness of shame in the blogosphere. In 2003, for example, China had its first blogging sex scandal, which played out rather differently from its American counterpart. In July 2003, a Chinese sex columnist named Mu Zimei had the highest-ranked Web site in China once she started naming names on her personal blog. She described her liaisons with various men, including an undistinguished tryst outside a restaurant with a rock-star guitarist from Guangzhou. The blog temporarily shut down because the Chinese service provider couldn’t handle the millions of visitors, and a vigorous debate broke out in the blogosphere about whether Mu Zimei had violated the privacy of the men she identified. ”Mu Zimei has released the name of the men who has ever slept with,” wrote a Shanghai blogger named Wangjianshuo. ”This is bad. I believe a blog can reveal whatever you want to show about yourself, but not others.” In response to criticism from the blogosphere, Mu Zimei deleted the explicit discussions of her sexual encounters when Sina.com began to serialize her work in November.

Should Washingtonienne have been shamed as well? Many of the bloggers I talked to thought so. ”I would never reveal the identity of a date — it violates the honor among bloggers, which resembles honor among thieves,” Warrior Princess said. ”Using initials was irresponsible, and the whole point of it was to call attention to herself,” Alex of Business Casual said. ”I feel really bad for the boyfriend.” Or as his blogging girlfriend, Smitten, put it: ”She was anonymous, but the other people she wrote about weren’t given that benefit. She had the right to privacy, but nobody else did. Gag.”

ANHATTAN, Kan., Dec. 15 – Earlier this year, as Sgt. Alexander Garcia’s plane took off for home after his tense year of duty in Iraq, he remembered watching the receding desert sand and thinking, I will never see this place again.

Never lasted about 10 months for Sergeant Garcia, a cavalry scout with the First Armored Division who finished his first stint in Iraq in March and is now preparing to return.

He and the rest of his combat brigade at Fort Riley, the Army base a few miles from this town, have been working for weeks, late into the frigid prairie nights, cleaning and packing gear and vehicles for the trip back to Baghdad after the New Year.

“I figured that the Army was big enough that one unit would not have to go back again before this thing was over,” said Sergeant Garcia, 20. “It’s my job and it’s my country, and I don’t have any regrets. But I kind of feel like I did my part. Just as I was readjusting to life back home, just as I was starting to feel normal again, this kind of throws me back into the waves.”

No one is feeling normal anymore at Fort Riley and other bases across the country, where military life is undergoing a radical change. They are stoic here, and many point out, as Sergeant Garcia does, that they signed up for this.

Still, in decades past, troops had gotten used to a predictable rhythm to their deployments. Even during Desert Storm and Vietnam, most soldiers could expect to take just one trip into harm’s way.

But with the military stretched thin in Iraq and in Afghanistan, some soldiers and marines are being sent to war zones repeatedly, for longer stretches in some cases, and with far less time at home between deployments than they say they have ever experienced before.

Here in Kansas, the base and the small towns nearby have begun to resemble an enormous machine in an endless cycle: bringing soldiers home with late-night celebrations in gymnasiums and screaming roadside banners, and then sending them off again, with fresh uniforms, new DVD players and snapshots, and formal farewells.

The motion is constant, whirring along, even as the world beyond Fort Riley’s churning slows down for the holidays. Next month, a brigade of 3,500 Fort Riley soldiers will begin returning to Iraq for a second time; a few days ago, 3,500 others, many of whom arrived home to their quiet Midwestern post this fall, learned they would be headed back to Iraq as early as the middle of next year.

This frenzied pace is swiftly becoming the norm. Nearly a third of the 950,000 people from all branches of the armed forces who have been sent to Iraq or Afghanistan since those conflicts began have already been sent a second time. Part-time soldiers – Army national guardsmen and reservists – who often have handled support roles, not frontline combat roles, are slightly more likely to have served more than one deployment to the conflict zones than regular Army members.

And, of the nearly 1,300 troops who have died in Iraq since the war began, more than 100 of them were on second tours.

The change is leaving its emotional mark on thousands of military families. Some family members say the repeated separations have been like some awful waking dream, holding their breath for their soldiers to make it home safely, only to watch them leave once more. Some families who have lost loved ones on repeat tours of duty said they felt a particular ache – a sense that the second trip pushed fate too hard.

Among some of the soldiers themselves, the thought of returning to Iraq carries one puzzling quality: Unlike so many parts of life, in which the second try at anything feels easier than the first, these soldiers say that heading to Iraq is actually more overwhelming the second time around.

“The first time, I didn’t know anything,” Sergeant Garcia said. “But this time I know what I’m getting into, so it’s harder. You know what you’re going to do. You know how bad you’re going to be feeling.”

During peacetime, marines have usually been deployed for six months, then stationed at home for 18 months, said Capt. Dan McSweeney, a Marine Corps spokesman. For now, Captain McSweeney said, the pace for some is closer to seven months away and seven months home. About half of the 32,000 marines now stationed in Iraq are serving second tours, he said.

The Army’s goal is that fulltime soldiers can expect deployments one year of every three, and reservists expect to go away far less, one year of every six, said Lt. Col. Christopher Rodney, an Army spokesman. At the moment, though, Colonel Rodney said, some soldiers are leaving for a year and coming home for a year, though some tours have stretched longer, some stays at home shorter.

Army officials said they were seeking ways to make repeated deployments easier on soldiers and their families, as the Army is shifted to create more brigades and to spread the burdens. Colonel Rodney said that the military was also trying to give troops as much advance warning about deployments as possible. The Army’s chaplains, too, said they were offering more extensive relationship counseling for military families as one way to ease the strains.

“This is a completely new and completely different kind of animal,” said Sgt. First Class Tom Ogden, a member of an Army aviation unit from Fort Carson, Colo., who has spent nearly 20 years in the military.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “And what everybody is starting to know now is that this is going to be what’s going on for the foreseeable future.”

Sergeant Ogden, 37, returned home to his wife, Rene, and their 7-year-old twins in April. His unit is to leave again, he said, in March. “For me, this one will be harder,” he said. “The last time, we thought there was an off-chance we would see some stuff. But things have escalated, and now we know we will.”

At Fort Riley, soldiers and their families said they had wrestled with the new, faster pace. Some spouses said they worried about managing so much of life alone – children, bills, cars and home repairs.

“I think this is the new norm,” said Sandra Horton, whose husband, Staff Sgt. T. J. Horton, is to leave Fort Riley for Iraq, once again, in January.

The Hortons have been through the stresses and loneliness of deployments many times in Sergeant Horton’s 17 years in the service, and they said they would manage just fine this time, too. Again and again, they both said that this was simply his job, even if it meant that Ta’Von, 6, grew many more inches before his father saw him again.

Still, in a quiet moment, Ms. Horton acknowledged: “It feels never-ending now. We feel like he’s always gone. But what can we do?”

For Specialist James Webb, a younger soldier here at Fort Riley, the family stresses seem overwhelming. “I feel like I’m in a no-win situation,” he said.

Specialist Webb, 28, lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment off the base. He talks on the telephone for hours to his wife, who lives in Georgia. He said he was lonely, struggling with depression and being treated for post-traumatic stress from the roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades he saw as a gunner on the top of a Humvee.

He returned this fall, but has not been able to reunite permanently with his wife and three stepdaughters because he cannot find them on-base housing. His wife moved home, to Georgia, during his deployment, and now there is talk of another deployment as quickly as next year.

“There’s been some distance,” he said somberly of his wife, whom he married in October 2002, not long before his first deployment. “She’s really not liking the military lifestyle at all. She tells me things would be better if I just moved back to Georgia.”

Still, Specialist Webb said he hoped to remain a soldier for his career, though he said he worried about losing his family.”At the same time, this is my job,” he said. “I signed on the dotted line. And this is a small thing I can do for my country, to protect my wife and stepdaughters.”

No one can be certain how the pace of deployment may affect the military in the years ahead: Will soldiers finish their enlistments and leave? Will fewer recruits agree to sign up? Two studies based on data before the 2001 terrorist attacks suggested that service members who had one or two deployments were more likely to re-enlist than those who had had no deployments, but the pace and danger levels of deployments have shifted since then.

Cpl. Kenneth Epperson, a Fort Riley soldier, said that he and his wife, Amanda, were fine with the pace of deployment. His daughter, Nikki, was born while he was in Iraq, and he has spent many weeks since he returned in April away from his family again, getting special training in California and Georgia.

“I joined the Army to be a soldier,” said Corporal Epperson, who is 21 and headed back to Iraq in a few weeks. “I expected this.”

Others were surprised.

At Camp LeJeune, in North Carolina, Lance Cpl. Peter Kirby said he probably would not re-enlist in the Marines when his contract ends in 16 months. He had thought about the military as a career, Corporal Kirby said, but was now leaning toward being a police officer or a park service worker.

“This isn’t the life I’d like to lead,” he said, adding that he was getting married in a few weeks. “If I’m going to start a family, I don’t want to be absent in my kids’ lives.”

In Tucson, Elena Zurheide is preparing Christmas for her 7-and-a-half-month-old son, Robert III. “I hate Christmas,” Ms. Zurheide said. “I hate holidays. I hate everything right now.”

Her husband, Robert Jr., was a lance corporal in the Marines. He was killed in Falluja this spring, a few weeks before their son was born. He was on his second tour to Iraq.

“I never wanted him to go a second time,” she said. “I just started having the feeling that we were pushing our luck too far, and he thought so, too.”

She said she wrote to Corporal Zurheide’s commander before he left, asking that her huband be permitted to stay behind – or that he at least be allowed to wait for the birth of their son. She said she never heard back.

“I should have broken his arm to keep him here,” she said. “I knew it was too much to go again.”

Her son, Ms. Zurheide said, looks just like his father.

ashington — EVEN with the world’s most advanced military machine at its disposal, the United States is having remarkable difficulty defeating or even containing the relatively small number of Saddam Hussein loyalists, religious extremists and foreign terrorists in Iraq. Thus the plan to gradually turn security matters over to the Iraqis would seem to be doomed from the start. But a closer look at the insurgents’ goals and methods may give clues to a better approach.

The 15,000 or so insurgents are spoilers whose disparate long-term aims range from pipe dreams of restoring the Baathist regime to installing a fundamentalist Islamist autocracy. But the futility of their long-term goals does nothing to impede their short-term effectiveness. The 150,000 Iraqis who have so far joined the state security services can do little to stand in their way; in fact, even if their ranks increased to 500,000 through rushed training, they would still be largely ineffective.

However, a force of 25,000 or so highly trained Iraqi internal security troops, operating at the pointy end of the spear, with the remaining bulk of Iraqi forces in a supporting role, might be able to do the job. That’s because counterinsurgency is not about numbers; the quality of the security forces, not their quantity, is the key.

Traditional military forces are not geared toward the mainly urban operations needed to defeat small cells of guerrillas. In particular, Iraq needs security forces that are trained specifically in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations. Yet because of the scale of the insurgency, we have been forced to use the fledgling Iraqi Army and National Guard. Most guardsmen have had only cursory training, and the army troops have largely been prepared for conventional military defense against external threats. Not only is pressing them into counterinsurgency duties a misuse of their training, it’s bad politics: the army was a tool for internal repression under Saddam Hussein, and it should not play a prominent internal security role in a democratic Iraq.

The answer lies with specially trained Iraqi internal security forces, separate from the standard military, including mobile counterterrorism units, light-infantry police battalions and SWAT teams. There are now only a handful of battalions with such training. Yet, with the help of intelligence coordination and American logistical support, they have been effective. They performed well alongside coalition troops in Falluja and Samarra, and pulled off a hostage rescue in Kirkuk in which the Americans provided only logistical support.

Unfortunately, the coalition was late off the mark in building up these units, and the training is long – a minimum of 16 weeks for each man, as compared to the two weeks of boot camp given a typical guardsman.

Recruits from the different Iraqi forces are being trained at bases and police academies across Iraq by coalition personnel and Iraqi officers who have undergone “train the trainer” courses. In addition, some military officers are receiving leadership instruction in military colleges in America, Britain, Italy and Australia. Police recruits are also being given intensive counterinsurgency training in neighboring states, including Jordan.

The coalition has a goal of 33 battalions of these troops, some 25,000 men, which seems about right (any more, and there exists the long-term risk of a force that could rival the civilian government). Achieving this goal would be best done through the additional deployment of an American training brigade (ideally including members of one of the Army’s elite ranger training battalions) as well as several hundred more police trainers from local departments and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

As vital as this assistance will be, however, the coalition must be careful not to sacrifice principles essential to a democracy, like the rights of the detained and civilian control over the armed forces. The latter is a particular danger if the army becomes immersed in internal security roles.

Training these specialized troops will take time; the United States should be prepared to shoulder the main burden of Iraqi security for the next 6 to 12 months. The Bush administration, which is so fond of publicizing the large numbers of Iraqi soldiers and police officers in uniform, should forget about the raw numbers. Instead, we must focus on training more of the right type of Iraqi security forces to do the job.

Peter Khalil, a visiting fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, was the director of national security policy for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq from August 2003 to May 2004.

AGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 19 – Only days into Iraq’s six-week election campaign, car bombers struck crowds in Najaf and Karbala on Sunday, killing at least 61 people and wounding about 120 in those two holy Shiite cities. In the heart of Baghdad, about 30 insurgents hurling grenades and firing machine guns pulled three election officials from their car in the midst of morning traffic and killed them with shots to the head.

Taken together, the attacks represented the second-worst daily civilian death toll from insurgent mayhem in Iraq since the American military occupation transferred formal sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government nearly six months ago.

The worst attack was on July 28, when as many as 70 people were killed by a suicide bomber near a police recruiting center in the city of Baquba, north of Baghdad.

The attacks raised the specter of exactly the kind of violence that American and Iraqi officials have been hoping to minimize ahead of assembly elections on Jan. 30 that are a watershed in the American-inspired blueprint for democracy in Iraq.

Iraqi politicians arguing for a delay in the elections to allow for renewed mediation efforts with Sunni insurgents have repeatedly warned of the risks of a wave of sectarian killings, as well as attacks on election officials and candidates.

In Najaf and Karbala, Shiite clerics and government officials attributed the bombings to Sunni extremists seeking to ignite sectarian strife with the country’s Shiite majority. The bombings took place within two hours of each other in crowded areas in the center of the cities near the Shiite sect’s holiest shrines.

In Baghdad, the Iraqi Election Commission, supervising the campaign, described the victims of the ambush on Baghdad’s notoriously lawless Haifa Street as martyrs and appealed urgently to all Iraqis to “support the lives of our officials.”

The bombings in Najaf and Karbala seemed calculated to cause maximum loss of life and a wave of anger among Shiites, who constitute about 60 percent of Iraq’s 25 million people.

In Karbala, a suicide car bomber detonated his vehicle amid minibuses at the entrance to the city’s bus terminal. In Najaf, a car bomb exploded in a central square crowded with people watching a tribal leader’s funeral procession, among them the provincial governor and the city’s police chief, both of whom escaped unhurt.

Accounts filed by an Iraqi employee of The New York Times and Western news agencies told of residents pulling bodies from the rubble of shops around Maidan Square in the heart of Najaf’s Old City, about 100 miles south of Baghdad.

An Associated Press report quoted Yousef Munim, an official at the city’s Al Hakim Hospital, as saying that the hospital’s preliminary account showed 47 people killed and 69 wounded. The blast occurred a few hundred yards from the Imam Ali Shrine, one of the most sacred in Shiite Islam, which was the center of an American-led offensive in August that cleared the city of rebels loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, but at a heavy cost in civilian lives and damage to buildings near the shrine.

In Karbala, about 50 miles north of Najaf, the bombing took place within a short walk of the Imam Hussein Shrine, another sacred site, outside of which another bomb exploded last Wednesday that killed 12 people and wounded dozens of others, including a close aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most powerful Shiite cleric.

Ali al-Ardawi, an assistant to the director of Al Hussein Hospital, said 14 people were killed and 52 wounded.

Shiite religious and political leaders said it was clear that Sunni insurgents were responsible. “They are trying to ignite a sectarian civil war and prevent elections from going ahead on time,” said Muhammad Bahr al-Uloum, a moderate cleric who has worked with American officials to smooth the way for the elections. He added: “They have failed before, and they will fail again. The Shiites are committed not to respond with violence, which will only lead to more violence. We are determined on elections, as Ayatollah Sistani has made clear.”

A similar message came from a leader in the powerful alliance of Shiite religious parties that entered the campaign under the patronage of Ayatollah Sistani, who has unrivaled influence among religious Shiites. Haidar al-Ubadi, a senior official in the Dawa party, one of the alliance’s most important constituents, said Najaf and Karbala were singled out because of their symbolism, and because elections had been expected to run smoothly there after several months of relative quiet.

Mr. Ubadi blamed Sunni insurgents of the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect, who have been identified by American military intelligence as a core insurgency group. The Wahhabis’ main stronghold, American officials believe, runs from the so-called Triangle of Death south of Baghdad up the Euphrates River into Anbar Province, where Wahhabi groups linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant who is America’s most-wanted man in Iraq, maintained their headquarters until recently in Falluja. From this area, it is barely an hour’s drive to Karbala, and not much farther to Najaf.

“The Wahhabis are being fed intelligence from the Baathists to carry out this slaughter,” Mr. Ubadi said, referring to Iraq’s governing party under Saddam Hussein. “We will hand them victory if we respond in kind.”

Elsewhere on Sunday, masked insurgents issued a videotape showing what they said were 10 abducted Iraqis who had been working for an American company, the Sandi Group, and said they would kill them unless the company withdrew from Iraq. The company, one of dozens of American, European and Middle Eastern enterprises engaged in efforts to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure, said it employed more than 7,000 people in Iraq.

Mr. Hussein, or at least lawyers who say they spoke for him, seemed to be trying to influence the elections from his detention cell. The lawyers, hired by Mr. Hussein’s family to defend him before the Iraqi tribunal set up to try top leaders of the ousted government, told a news conference in Jordan that an Iraqi lawyer on the defense team who met with Mr. Hussein last week quoted him as urging Iraqis to be “wary” of the elections.

The leader of the legal team, Ziad Khassawneh, said the Iraqi lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi, traveled to Jordan after the meeting with Mr. Hussein on Thursday, then returned to Baghdad after reporting on Mr. Hussein’s remarks, according to an Agence France-Presse report. Mr. Khassawneh said Mr. Hussein had offered “recommendations” to Iraqis through Mr. Dulaimi.

Asked by Mr. Hussein to be briefed on developments in the country, Mr. Dulaimi told him there were to be elections, according to the account from Mr. Khassawneh. “At that point, the president said to Dulaimi that the Iraqi people should ‘be wary of this issue,’ ” Mr. Khassawneh said.

Mr. Hussein was also reported to have cited a verse from the Koran, “Hold onto God’s law and don’t scatter,” that Mr. Dulaimi had reported to be a call for unity, Mr. Khassawneh said, and the former Iraqi leader was said to have sent a message to religious leaders saying that they “must bear the historical responsibility for what is happening in Iraq.”

It was impossible to confirm Mr. Hussein’s reported remarks, but they appeared almost coded, perhaps to meet constraints imposed on lawyers meeting top Iraqi detainees. An Iraqi official familiar with the tribunal’s work said lawyers were not allowed to discuss events in Iraq since the men were captured and subjected to a news blackout, without newspapers, radio and television.

The attack on the election officials in Baghdad had implications that, in some ways, were almost as threatening as the bombings. The insurgents gave notice of their plan to disrupt the campaign by attacking two voter registration offices in northern Iraq last week, but the ambush on Sunday was much bolder. The attackers struck less than a mile from the Green Zone compound in central Baghdad that is the nerve center for the Americans here, and for the interim Iraqi government. They also showed, again, that Haifa Street, one of the city’s main boulevards, is practically enemy-held territory.

The Iraqi election officials singled out in the ambush, assigned to a local voter registration office in Baghdad, appeared to have been selected for assassination, and the attackers appeared confident that they could carry it out with impunity. Accounts by witnesses reported by The Associated Press said that after dragging the victims from the vehicle and shooting them, the insurgents set fire to their vehicle, then wandered along the street brandishing their weapons. The police said later that one attacker had been killed.

The election commission, with a staff of about 900 officials and about 6,000 part-time workers, has been racing to complete voter lists based on a Hussein-era register of families eligible for rationed foods and medicines. The lists have yielded a potential electorate of nearly 14 million people, but registration offices are bracing for a tide of people seeking to correct entries that Iraqi officials have said contain inaccuracies. Uncorrected, the officials say, the mistakes could lead to the disenfranchisement of large numbers of voters, further threatening the credibility of the elections.

The apparent inability of the American-led military force in Iraq to accelerate the training of sufficient numbers of Iraqis to be responsible for security has become a major issue as the election draws near.

On Sunday, Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, offered pointed criticism of the American-trained security forces, saying they were not capable of bringing stability to the country. It was the first time Mr. Warner, just back from a trip to Iraq, had spoken publicly about shortcomings in the Bush administration’s plan to bring security to Iraq.

“We put our whole case, resting our case, on the ability to bring in the Iraqi people and train them in police, national guard, army duties and security forces,” Mr. Warner said on the NBC News program “Meet the Press.” “In my judgment it is falling behind in its capability and commitment to pick up the job and carry it forward.”

Iraqi employees of The New York Times in Najaf and Karbala contributed reporting for this article.