At Baalbek Nuts I bought pistachios from the Lebanese owners, who answered my request for their thoughts on the war with the typically Lebanese response of no problem. It's a lie, as we all knew.

The Americans may think they have 'liberated' Baghdad but the tens of thousands of thieves - they came in families and cruised the city in trucks and cars searching for booty - seem to have a different idea what liberation means.

Some of the guys in the Northern Alliance are war criminals. One of the Northern Alliance commanders ran a slave girl network in Kabul in 1994. Remember that there was a period when every woman on the streets was at risk of being raped. This was the Northern Alliance period of glory.

Bin Laden is not well read and he's not sophisticated, but he will have worked out very coldly what America would do.

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

Why is it that we go to immense lengths getting the Serbs who were responsible for the massacre of 7,000 at Srbrenica-that's slightly more than the total figure for New York 9/11-and we take them to a tribunal in The Hague, and one after another, we arraign them, try them, convict them, and punish them in front of the world, but no plans have been brought forward to get Osama bin Laden and his friends and put them on trial.

And it's true, you hear things in Damascus and, after a few hours, the human double-take stops operating.