I do not make stories up, full stop.

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.

President Bush cruelly manipulated the grief of the American people - and the sympathy of the rest of the world - to introduce a 'world order' dreamed up by a clutch of fantasists advising the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.

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.

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 - 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 bin Laden and his friends and put them on trial?

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.

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.