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.

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 become an anti-Semite. And as powerful as the Israeli lobby is, the Saudi lobby is just as powerful. In fact, the Saudis probably have more money to throw around, and they suborn former U.S. intelligence officials, former ambassadors, former generals to support them from within by lobbying the Congress and other American institutions.

The war in Iraq - if Osama was a Christian - it's the Christmas present he never would have expected.

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

I think you can take the recent war in Lebanon as a very good example of how this plays. The Americans and their allies clearly stood back - clearly in the eyes of Muslims - and basically said to the Israelis, "Do what you need to do, and we'll hold the ring for you and not call a cease-fire." That perception in the Muslim world very much played to the anti-American sentiment.

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.