What I tried to do is to present the evidence that's available and that no one has been able to refute. Not even the Arab governments who own their media have been able to denigrate bin Laden as a man.

The second touchstone for America I think unquestionably was pushing to conclusion the program we had with the Russians to control the Soviet nuclear arsenal. I tend to think that more than anything else, that will come back to haunt us.

They [politicians] have defined the war simply in terms of the detonation of explosives. When you look at the broader picture, America is mired in two wars that we're losing at the moment. We have a political environment that is as poisonous as anything I've seen, at least since the end of Vietnam.

The second part of that war was that Muslims came from all over the country to Pakistan, and they met each other. For the first time those men had an awareness of the Islamic world as a whole, not of just Egypt or Algeria or Indonesia, but of what Muslims call the Uma, the Islamic community. And that's an extraordinarily important thing. And that emanated in Pakistan.

I've said before: If Osama bin Laden was a Christian, Iraq was the Christmas present he always wanted but never expected his parents to give. It validated for the Muslim world virtually all of bin Laden's rhetoric. He had always said the Americans will destroy any strong Muslim regime, and we did.

In terms of Iraq, al Qaeda valued Iraq because we destroyed a government it wanted destroyed and because we put soldiers on the ground and forces that they could attack. Al Qaeda is basically an insurgent organization that was formed on the model of the Afghan groups. And being bred in that war, they value a contiguous safe haven as much as anything else.

We've gone thorough religious wars and civil wars. America has gone through slavery, we've all gone through two world wars, segregation. Ultimately it's been a bloody, trying, wasteful, but eventually positive struggle.