I can tell you one thing: It doesn't matter what the American people think. There's going to be an awful lot more body bags.

I would recommend any American who wants to understand where the government is going in the next four years of George W. Bush presidency to get a copy of her confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It's a road map, and it's pretty frightening testimony. Their definition of where democracy should go in the Middle East doesn't include Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan; it only includes Iraq, Iran, and Syria.

Nixon clearly broke the law in the cover up of Watergate and hush money payments. That was all criminal activity. With these guys, we're not talking about the kind of common crimes that Nixon committed. I can't tell you whether they are technically breaking the law, but basically, the American government has been hijacked by neoconservatives. They are taking an awful lot of national security operations into the White House.

Essentially Rumsfeld wins, Cheney wins, and the CIA and State Department lose. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have more centralized control over intelligence, analysis, and operations than ever before. And the way they interpret the law, if the President authorizes an intelligence mission to be run covertly by the Pentagon, they don't have to tell anybody, including Congress, about it because the President is the commander in chief.

The funny thing is, this is what everyone assumes, that anybody who talks has an axe to grind. I've been around a long time, and yes, there obviously are people who disagree with policy who talk to me, but it's less axes to grind than people who are really motivated. One of the terrible things about this Administration is that nobody wants to hear bad news.

It doesn't matter what a majority of Americans say. George W.Bush is going to do what he thinks he must do. And history may be tough on him in the next ten years but I guess he rationalizes that in fifty or 100 years they'll bless us because there will be - maybe not in his lifetime, but someday-a democratic Iraq emulating the United States in its liberalism, in its fair-mindedness, and that democracy will spread to Iran and Syria, and that whole part of the Middle East will be happy, and terrorism will be gone, and the Israelis will be flourishing, and the oil will flow. That's his vision.

They are people who, by and large, think the Administration's policy - and the Iranian case is a classic one - is very stupid. They can't get that view in, and so by talking to me, they accomplish something. It's a way of saying, this ought to be discussed, we got to get this out. That's a form of patriotism, in a funny way.