It is important to know how influential people think and perceive their countrymen, let's say, especially when you are talking about people in power. I think it can be very revealing how they regard themselves and their relationship or their responsibility to their countrymen. That is vital for us all to know and in order to be able to judge them and evaluate them.

I think it's deeply important for us to know, especially when we come from the outside, how "ordinary people" think and feel and what their expectations are and what their concerns are. Also what's in their imaginations, what's in their minds, even what their rumors are and what their gossip is.

Life has become terribly insecure. It's on the vortex of civil war. It's difficult to know how America will bring it back from the brink and build up good will.

I don't think we would have had to be an occupying power if we had done the right thing in 1991.

The mercy caravans are through there the medicine refugees flowing out. It makes the United States look very bad here. And much more like an occupation force than it did before.

That's what's terrible about wars when whole societies adopt an impulse of objectification. Everything becomes black and white.

If you're young and inexperienced you might accept what people tell you, that everything's going to be fine, it's okay. It's usually other young people saying that, who don't know any better. It's good to have a survival instinct because increasingly, especially in the whole Arab Spring sort of violence, you're mostly with young people who have not experienced what they're doing before.