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.

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.

I think one of the most destructive things in terms of American security has been for all of our leaders, without exception in both parties, to identify Osama bin Laden as a gangster or as a madman, as an apocalyptic character who's out to destroy our civilization.

There is no way to avoid the reality that the American government in the past years has been the most spectacularly hypocrisy-driven government in the world. We rival the Soviet Union in some stages, in some ways, in hypocrisy.

It is clear to me that the racism was on the other foot, that really, society in Europe was much more racist - vis-à-vis Arabs at least and black Africans - than American society.

You couldn't have done this without killing an Arab prince.

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.