Michel Aflaq - is bad poetry wrapped in the guise of utopian politics, or great poetry wrapped in the guise of horrible politics.

The truly astounding thing is the Baathist regime supports poetry like nobody else, probably in the world.

In the Green Zone in Iraq you have your radio, you have your food, you have your own electricity, your own toilets. Everything is a sealed American reality overlaid on top of an infrastructure that is crumbling.

The corruption in Iraq has nothing to do with ideas - it has to do with the regime and institutional structures and power.

In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing. You have to attempt what they did in that language - say, in Arabic - and try to accomplish a version of that in English, and you're constantly serving two masters.

English is a forgiving language. It's not like Classical Arabic and it's not like French. You can speak broken English and be expressive and no one will hold it against you.

There are certainly times in history where power associates itself closely with fields that we would call the humanities, like rulers surrounding themselves with philosophers and poets, or playwrights. We do not live in that moment, and the best way to gauge the proximity of an academic field to power is by salary.