Before Baghdad burns

In his review of your book in the New York Times Book Review, Fouad Ajami portrayed you as being completely against any military intervention. Is that correct?

Quite the contrary. I think Saddam Hussein is a huge problem. And the U.S. might not have any choice but, at some point, to take miltary action in Iraq. But if we do that, we have got to understand what we're getting into because the political problems after Saddam Hussein is gone are going to be much greater than the military challenge of getting rid of him.

Are the problems of getting rid of him the same as those of simply waiting for him to die or be deposed? Will the same kind of chaos follow regardless? Ajami seems to think you're excessively pessimistic about that.

He doesn't recognize the level of hostility to the U.S. that's in Iraq. I've been in Iraq, and while it's difficult to talk with the people there, you know what they think about the U.S. because of the sanctions and because Saddam Hussein has so brainwashed them that the economic situation is totally our fault. The idea that they're going to be out there flying kites to welcome us into Iraq ...

That seems particularly foolish because the people who did that in Kabul are Central Asians, not Arabs, and they don't have the same history of long-stoked resentment of the U.S.

You need at least some hope that the Palestinian situation will be resolved before you go into Iraq. Those two things are tied together. You have to do one before you do the other.

After World War II, there was so much Western angst about the Holocaust, as there should have been, that when the state of Israel declared its independence in 1948, there really wasn't adequate thought given -- we immediately recognized the state of Israel, even though the State Department warned Truman not to do it. Many of the Jews who were in Israel in '48 and through the '50s were Western Jews who'd come out of Europe and they really understood how to communicate with the West. No one ever paid attention to the Palestinian issue, which was representative to the Arabs of how they had always been treated by the West since the Crusades. The foundation of the state of Israel was interpreted by the Arabs not as justified by the Holocaust but as an extension of Western imperialism in the Arab world that goes back to the Middle Ages. And not just imperialism, but the arrogance of the West, which has regarded Muslim society and Islam as grossly inferior to the West.

You have all of this and you get into the Cold War, with Israel saying that it's the only ally of the West in the Middle East. The Arab states didn't feel as if they had anyplace to go to say what their grievances were regarding Western intrusion into the Arab world and the presence of Israel and the dilemma of the Palestinians. We just sort of ignored all this, and it's gotten to the point today that it's become intolerable to the Arabs, to their dignity. This is an honor-driven society.

That seems to be a legacy of Arab tribalism that Americans often don't understand. Maintaining your honor and your dignity in a tribal culture is really a necessity for survival. An insult is dangerous to more than just your feelings.

That's true. In a tribal culture, to tolerate an insult is to show weakness, which is to invite attacks from your enemies. It's a threat of annihilation. This is something we don't understand when we keep saying, "Why do they hate us?" They're angry with us because they feel we've never given them the dignity that they feel they deserve. Israeli military might and their claims to having made the desert bloom where the Arabs before them could do nothing with it -- that's all seen as the result of the American aid Israel gets. This has been going on for decade after decade, building up hostility to the United States. What's going on right now, the Bush adminstration's attitude toward the Sharon government, is not protecting the United States. It's making more problems for us. My great fear is that the "Arab street," the non-elites of the Arab world, are just going to explode and we're going to have real problems.

You say in the book that ultimately the road to Baghdad runs through Jerusalem. Too much intervention on the part of America anywhere in the Middle East is going to run into big problems as long as the U.S. is seen as unfairly favoring Israel.

One thing we really have to be aware of if we do a unilateral invasion of Iraq is that we're going to destabilize that whole area because the ordinary Arab is going to see that not as an attempt to free the Iraqis, but as a U.S. invasion of an Arab country for the purpose of getting control of Iraqi oil reserves and to protect Israel from Saddam Hussein.

Yet despite all these potential pitfalls, there is an element of the U.S. government that's pushing for an invasion to get rid of Saddam. Who are they and what do you think is driving them?

It's in the Defense Department, certain elements in Congress and certain parts of the conservative press. It comes down to several factors. Donald Rumsfeld is very interested in getting rid of Saddam Hussein because he wants to reduce the amount of money required to keep troops in the Persian Gulf to patrol Saddam Hussein. He's got other reasons, but that's where he's coming from. Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, some of these Defense Department advisory council members, they're ideologues. They would deny this, and I don't know if they even realize this, but they are looking at protecting Israel rather than looking at the long-term interests of the United States. And the country that Saddam Hussein poses the most danger to is Israel.

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