The Islamic State is able to raise finances through taxation, through theft of banks, and certainly through oil sales from the Omar oilfields in eastern Syria. So right now the question of funding isn't of the essence.

It is convenient for Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair to say the rise of the Islamic State has nothing to do with the Iraq War because that takes the culpability off their shoulders. The Islamic State is a product of the Iraq War. It took about a 100 years to build the Iraqi state, and the Americans and the British destroyed it in an afternoon.

You see, one strand...of anarchism believed that you needed to use essentially homeopathic doses of terror by assassinating people, et cetera, the so-called 'propaganda of the deed', and that this propaganda of the deed would rouse people up, give them confidence to rise up. Another section believed 'No, it was not by seeing something happen that people get confidence, but it's by acting', in other words, the movements must go among the people and produce small struggles, bigger struggles, to give people greater and greater confidence.

People were, in good faith perhaps, writing history books about the Indian working class, Indian peasantry, et cetera, and at no point did Communists make an entry, not even to be criticized. They were essentially being whitewashed from history.

It's plain that the American right wing, the Republicans and some sections of the Democratic Party, don't really care about international norms. They believe in the executive authority of the president. They don't even believe the United Nations or international law should play any role vis-à-vis American policymaking.

You see often it's not ideas, it's inertia, it's bureaucratism, it's all the other things that sometimes come in the way of a good idea.

Turkey is using the Islamic State in the same way as Pakistan used the Taliban in Afghanistan. You know, that's perhaps Turkey's strategy.