Why is thinking about crime or imagining crime so goddamn central to pop culture? It doesn't matter whether it's American TV or British TV. And there's entire sections of bookstores devoted to crime.

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.

Just as certain Cold War binaries were collapsing, new binaries of Sunni versus Shia or Arab versus Kurd were being created by the new occupation force. It's the corruption of that moment that I am really interested in.

The Baathist state did two things extremely well. One was create information-gathering intelligence networks and a filing system. There's actually a lot of information on a lot of people and that is a major achievement of a police state. The second one is the promotion of literature and poetry, and the arts generally. So this is a state that's producing mass police archives - surveillance - and poetry. And in fact a lot of the archives are about what poets are writing or what they should be writing.

A high-ranking Syrian official in DC laughed when he heard I was reading Michel Aflaq and writing this book. He said, "Let me tell you something. There are no Baathists, no one believes this stuff, this is stuff you read in school because it's assigned to you. Maybe someone believed it, but no one really believes it." And I thought that was really interesting to hear, because the ideology of Baathism was presented so often to Americans as the core of what's wrong.

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

Translated books rarely get reviewed in the press. Books or poems or works of art that don't seem to have a corresponding style or figure or theme, obviously they're hard to digest.