Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.

Maybe Iraq will come back and become the dominant power among Arab countries. That seems to me as conceivable.

The basis of association and antagonism among countries has changed over time.

Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.

I've been to Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait for brief visits at conferences, and they are very interesting countries.

People everywhere talk about Islam and the West. Presumably that has some relationship to reality, that these are entities that have some meaning and they do. Of course the core ofthat reality is differences in religion.

People have multiple identities.