In just one year in Bosnia, thirty of my colleagues died. There is a little Somme waiting for all innocent journalists.

War is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.

When I saw the pictures of New York without the World Trade Center, New York looked like a shadow of itself.

We live in a society in the West, where, when men do violent things, they do them under orders. They are soldiers carrying out orders or mafia men carrying out killings for bosses. But the way things happen in the Middle East is not the same as in the West. Look, international capital has been globalized, so Osama bin Laden is globalized. It's not surprising to find followers of bin Laden in all these countries.

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.

I still wonder if the United States realizes how much planning went into this. When we talk about "mindless terrorists," we are lying to ourselves.

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.