The whole importance of Iraq is that we have now created two things. One, Iraq is in the Arab heartland in terms of an attraction for people who want to fight the Americans and their allies. It's far greater than anything Afghanistan was aftertheSoviets invaded. It's easy to get to, there's no trouble with languages.

The Western world doesn't really give enough credit to the importance in history of the Soviet invasion and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. For us it was a sideshow of the Cold War. For the Islamic world it was an unprovoked infidel invasion of a Muslim country not unlike Iraq.

The FBI continues to be a broken, anachronistic organization, but state and local law enforcement officials are much more attuned to the kind of threat we're facing. I think that's very hopeful, but it's a long-term process.

Bin Laden does reprehensible activities, and we should surely take care of that by killing him as soon as we can. But he's not an irrational man. He's a very worthy enemy. He's an enemy to worry about.

I think Mr. Clarke had a tendency to interfere too much with the activities of the CIA, and our leadership at the senior level let him interfere too much. So criticism from him I kind of wear as a badge of honor.

Sister Virginia used to say, 'You'll be known by the company you keep.'

Although my own view is that bin Laden does not want to stage an attack that looks like 9/11 in Europe simply because he does not want to be the agent of Trans-Atlantic reconciliation. I think they will continue to do attacks like Madrid, the British attack, the subway systems, because those attacks have proven that the European response so far has been to blame the domestic government, not to side with the Americans.