And we're being attacked because of what we do, not because of who we are. And by refusing to talk about that, I'm afraid the American people, at least, don't have a good idea of just how dangerous the threat is that we face.

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.

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.

There is a direct correlation between what al Qaeda says and what it does. And the one thing that has been the gold standard of correlation has been bin Laden's 1995 - or was it 1996? - pledge that every attack is going to be more powerful than the last. If you go back to the first attack in Yemen in 1992 and chart it out, every attack has been more powerful, more destructive than the last one.

You can forgive your leaders for not knowing the intricacies of Islamic history. You cannot forgive them for not knowing their own. And when you look at American democracy, where did it start? It started, if you need to pick a point, at Runnymede in 1215. We have now been at this process, we and our English-speaking allies, for 800 years.

I know these days it sounds a little odd, but American governments are very fearful of European reaction. They were afraid we would be considered gunslingers.

I think the world is more perilous and America is basically undefended. For me the two touchstones after 9/11 for domestic security were our borders. Not for discriminatory reasons or to stop immigration, but simply to allow law enforcement to find out who is in our country without facing an undocumented pool of aliens that increases by the hour.