And history`s fingers never relax their grip, never leave us unmolested, can touch us even when we would never imagine their presence.

U.S. journalists I don't think are very courageous. They tend to go along with the government's policy domestically and internationally. To question is seen as being unpatriotic, or potentially subversive.

Osama Bin Laden is not well read and he's not sophisticated, but he will have worked out very coldly what America would do in response to this attack 9/11. I'm sure he wanted America to attack Afghanistan. Once you do what your enemy wants, you are walking into a trap, whether you think it's the right thing to do or not.

After the allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father's war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career — in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad — watching the people within those borders burn.

In Palestine, the Israelis claim they found a land without people,' a Syrian officer explained to us. 'Now they will take southern Lebanon and claim they have found another land without people if these refugees do not return.

At the end of the day, bin Laden's interest is not Washington and New York, it's the Middle East. He wants Saudi Arabia. He wants to get rid of the House of Saud.

It's very easy to start a war but the muftah, as the Arabs say, the key to switch off a war, is very difficult to find.