There's actually a lot of information on a lot of people and that is a major achievement of a police state.

Translation is harder, believe it or not. You do have to come up with a story, and actually I'm mystified by that process. I don't exactly know how the story just comes, but it does. But in writing a story that you're inventing, versus writing a story that somebody else has made up - there's a world of difference. In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing.

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.

Each discipline has the capacity to be interested in politics, and each would ask different questions of what politics is, what constitutes power, how power is maintained, how it circulates, how relationships are formed, how institutions are built, how they fall. Every discipline would answer those questions in different ways.

The more I've reflected on that and asked Iraqi friends, the more I realize that the corruption in Iraq has nothing to do with ideas - it has to do with the regime and institutional structures and power. There's no core to what Michel Aflaq has to say that results in this. That was a key to looking at Michel Aflaq as a sideshow. He's the intellectual father of an ideology that no one probably ever believed in. At that point I began to appreciate him in a funny way.

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

Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and so on. But get that first draft.