I also think that there is a huge failure in the American education system to educate Americans about where we, our system, our government, came from. And to some extent this failure is shared in places like Britain and Canada and Australia.

I don't know what our capabilities are. If I were there, I think it would be nutty to do that. The only country on Earth more containable than Iran is Iraq. And we've certainly made a mistake there. We could have continued Saddam.

I think we'll see it mostly in the United States. We're getting to the point where al Qaeda is ready to again attack us inside America. I think we're basically defenseless.

We haven't done anything. That has devolved into a partisan bickering of the kind that says Nero was fiddling while Rome burned.

One of the problems of not allowing the American people to read what bin Laden has said is that in October 2001 just after the war began in Afghanistan, he gave a speech that had two parts to it.

But more important, I think, is the criticism bin Laden has made publicly over the past 10 years that Muslim governments cannot even protect their own people. And more than that, they'll often collude with the infidels. And if you recall, the initial reaction of the Arab league was to criticize Hezbollah and damn Hezbollah for the war. And they eventually had to turn 180degrees and support Hezbollah.

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.