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.

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

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.

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.

We live in an extraordinary time, in which one still has the ability to mold opinion. Also, it's up for grabs. Perceptions are up for grabs in a way that it hasn't been before, which makes it really interesting. Societies that have always defined other aspects of human experience, or histories, try to hold on to it and try to find ways to continue to be the ones who do the interpreting.

I think in a sense this is a house that was built on a bad foundation. And the foundation was the Americans coming here and allowing the sacking, burning and plunder of Baghdad, for whatever reason.

War is just what we do. Yet, of course, the effects of it are repeatedly deeper, then deeper, then deeper.