I don't know what happens if they get bin Laden. I'm much more interested in what happens if they don't get bin Laden.

Whether Osama bin Laden is doing it cynically and has no interest in these matters, or whether he's doing it out of genuine conviction, his voice has a tremendous resonance throughout the Arab world. One editorial in a Lebanese paper said it is a matter of great humiliation for the Arabs that the only man who can outline, truthfully, what our humiliations are is an Arab who has to say it from a cave in a foreign country.

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.

President Bush will come here and there will be new "friends" of America to open a new relationship with the world, new economic fortunes for those who "liberated" them.

Individuals in various countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia listen to the tapes of bin Laden. They gather in groups of four or five. They feel they want to do something to express their support for what they've heard. The idea that they were taking orders is a particularly Western idea.

Wasn't Saddam destroyed? Wasn't Gaddafi liquidated? Didn't Milosevic go to the Hague? All true. But Stalin survived. Kim Jong-un isn't doing too badly, either - though that's probably because he actually has nuclear weapons, as opposed to Iran which might or might not be trying to acquire them and thus remains on the Israeli-American target list.

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