A history of violence

Your book is coming into print just as Scooter Libby, who helped lead the U.S. into war, is leaving office under indictment. Iraq has become a bloody quagmire. The evidence that justified the U.S. invasion has turned out to be mostly exaggerated or falsified. Is there any evidence that the neoconservatives have been beaten into retreat?

I think since the invasion of Iraq went so awry, the neocons have suffered serious blows to their credibility and their prestige, and if I had to guess, I would think that even Donald Rumsfeld has thrown some tantrums about the stuff he was told by the neocons prior to the invasion of Iraq. On the other hand, they're a very tight-knit fraternity, they stick together, and they're very single-minded, so I don't count them out. I think the fact that Bolton has been shuffled off to the U.N., and that Wolfowitz and Feith are both gone from the Pentagon, are useful signs, and certainly the Libby investigation has the potential to unravel the whole spider web.

But I never count them out. I think in a way if you look at the broader picture in the Middle East, they knocked down Saddam, and now pressure is building on both Syria and Iran -- and that was really part of the original grand design for the region going back to 2001. We're also still in control of Afghanistan, we're building an empire in Central Asia, and Bush remains committed to this fantasy of democracy in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia overnight, and so in that sense, I think the neoconservative project for the Middle East is moving forward until it's dead and buried and flowers are growing on its coffin. I don't see that we can relax.

And we're still clearly in the midst of a rather poorly defined "war on terror," which includes the war in Iraq. Is that fight doing anything at all to deter al-Qaida?

Al-Qaida is an ideology above all, and it recruits activists and supporters from a pool of angry and bitter people who are upset, both with their place in life and what they see as injustice. The way to fight al-Qaida, in the broadest sense, is to remove the sense of grievance.

So, in that sense, contrary to what the Bush administration would argue, the way to fight al-Qaida is to pull out of Iraq, because [the U.S. presence] is creating tremendous incentive for people to pick up arms on behalf of this mythical new caliphate [pan-Islamic religious-political empire] that they want to create. It makes sense to reduce our footprint in the Persian Gulf, and in fact the whole Middle East, and to remove this seemingly imperial presence that creates so much anger and unhappiness there.

We should also work a lot harder to solve the problems on what neoconservatives like Bernard Lewis call the "fringes" of the Muslim world -- the conflicts from the Philippines to Kashmir to Chechnya to, of course, Palestine -- all of those disputes need to be reduced because they create heat that keeps the pot boiling. It's the molecules that escape from that boiling pot that are immediately snatched up by these terrorist groups in one form or another. They're catching the angriest, most nihilistic people coming out of this simmering pot. And so we need to lower the temperature.

And then we need to start more generally getting out of the way and letting the people in the region engage in rebuilding their societies and starting on the process of what I call "religion building" -- in other words, yanking big parts of the Islamic establishment into the 21st century and reconciling it with ideals of secular modern institutions where church and state are separated.

If we reduce our footprint now, if we pull out of Iraq, doesn't the U.S. then reward and embolden the hard-line fundamentalists who will say: "We've won a victory, we've driven them out -- next step, new caliphate."

I don't know how these lunatics are going to respond to the things we're going to do, but we need to do what's right: engage in policy reevaluation to come up with an approach to the region that is based on our real interests. And our real interests are not establishing an empire in the Middle East, and are certainly not a long-term occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and other countries Bush decides to drag us into.

The victory that bin Laden is trumpeting now is the victory of confirming everything that he has been arguing for the past 20 years -- and his forbears have been arguing for a century -- which is the clash of civilizations. The West is out to destroy Islam and rape its people and pillage its oil and destroy the Muslim religion -- that's the victory that bin Laden is trumpeting now.

By reducing our presence in the Middle East, we confound him. And most of the smart people who think about the Middle East know that by stumbling into this Iraqi tar baby we have done precisely what bin Laden in his wildest dreams could not have hoped for. We've confirmed his worst predictions.

Are democracy and political Islam simply incompatible? Is it critical to ban religious parties from Middle Eastern elections?

I don't think you can ban any sort of political party. I'm not for banning political parties, as long as they compete fairly in elections. I suppose you can point to Turkey as an example of a country that has a government basically run by an Islamist political party, and which is still maintaining both a democracy and sort of a universal approach toward people who don't agree. It's a very complicated question because passions are so high. People flock to these parties because they're desperate or angry or riled up by imams in mosques and it's so easy under current circumstances for this to spin out of control. It's a very delicate question -- I think the answer is to go slowly.

I think what happened in Iraq shows that most clearly. Here was a secular dictatorship. We destroyed it, and what emerged in its place is largely a Shiite theocracy on one side, and a Sunni movement that because of civil war conditions is itself pulled very strongly into a Sunni Islamic formation. Neither one of these Iraqi whirlpools -- either the Sunni or the Shiite Islamist ones -- need to be victorious. I believe there are many Shiites in Iraq who are unhappy with the theocrats, and there are many Sunnis --- probably the majority in Iraq -- who are nationalists and are secular. But as long as this conflict continues I believe both of those nonreligious elements in Iraq are going to increasingly lose out to the Islamist character of both the Shiite and Sunni leadership.

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