There's been a lot of speculation about the actual (and concealed) agenda behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq. What's your storyline for the administration's push for this war?

The core of the movement to support the war was the fraternity of the neoconservatives. I believe they saw the war in Iraq as a way of decisively demonstrating American power in a region of the world that was up for grabs in which they believed the United States had to have preeminence because of the oil. Not oil for American oil companies -- in fact, I've written articles about how American oil companies were opposed to the war in Iraq -- but oil in the strategic sense that a principal battle in the 21st century would be for control of Middle East oil between the United States and Russia and China and other powers.

And they picked the Middle East because of its geopolitical and geo-economic value. Tied to that I think quite closely was the fact that so many neoconservatives identify the destruction of Iraq with the security of Israel. So by knocking off Saddam, they believed they could throw the whole Middle East off balance in a way that would lead to an enhanced security environment for Israel.

That's why so many people have focused on the "clean break" paper that Richard Perle and Douglas Feith and [David and Meyrav Wurmser] and others delivered to Benyamin Netanyahu in 1996. It was kind of a redrawn map of the region that was supposed to be kind of a big-think picture of what Israel's security could be based on. The core of it was the elimination of Iraq, the destabilization of Syria, and the suppression to nonexistence really of the Palestinian movement. So I think two big motivations kind of linked together were oil and Israel.

"Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam"

By Robert Dreyfuss

Metropolitan Books

400 pages

Nonfiction

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Had it not been for 9/11, there is no question in my mind that they could not have achieved either the political support or the support in Congress for going to war in Iraq. And most likely they probably couldn't have even convinced President Bush to do so. Clearly, President Bush himself was traumatized by 9/11, and he and Karl Rove saw tremendous political value in carrying forward the idea of a war presidency and a war on terrorism. So, they capitalized on that, and they capitalized on Bush's hatred of Iraq for having tried to kill his daddy, and on other kinds of almost Freudian motivations that the president must have had for all this.

But that starts to get into the tactics of how they accomplished their end. I think the end that they wanted to accomplish was simply the flattening of Iraq and the transformation of Iraq into some kind of pliable American neo-colony.

Is there a historically obvious way to depoliticize Islam in states such as Afghanistan and Iraq, where the U.S. wields some de facto political and economic influence?

Unless someone can create some benevolent despot who can do it by snapping his fingers, I think it's going to be a project of many decades that has to be undertaken above all by the people who live there. You have to look at the reason why people turn to these kinds of movements. This wasn't something that happened overnight. This is something that is the product of so many decades of fear and anger and bitterness that unless the temperature is lowered, unless people are given the chance to engage in normal kinds of political debate, there is no chance of separating religion and politics.

Any thoughts on what's next for Syria as the investigation of the assassination of Lebanese politician Rafik Hariri unfolds?

Rather than increasing the pressure on Syria -- rather than squeezing it until it pops, we need to step back and allow diplomacy to work. I think clearly important elements of the Bush administration, and especially the neoconservatives, are pushing for regime change in Syria. They want the Assad government to collapse. They're doing it without any idea of what might come next.

There is an Ahmed Chalabi in the wings for Syria -- a guy named Fareed Al-Ghadiri who lives in the United States who has already had meetings with the State Department and the CIA. They're playing around with a coalition of Syrian exiles who are at least as unreliable as the Iraqi exiles were in 2003 --

That was going to be my next question...

-- but probably even more so. And just like in Iraq where the Shiite religious movement was waiting in the wings until Saddam fell, in Syria there is a majority Sunni population, many of whom are loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood, who are just itching to start a sectarian battle against the Alawite minority elements in Syria.

So it's a witches' brew. Syria could explode into a vicious, Lebanon-style catastrophe if Assad were to collapse. On the other hand, intelligence people who I've talked to say that Syria was very helpful after 9/11 in providing intelligence to the United States about al-Qaida, that Syria has absolutely no interest in supporting Islamist terrorism, and that if we want to stabilize Iraq we should be approaching both Syria and Iran directly on some diplomatic grounds to help reduce sectarian conflict in Iraq. Instead, what the Bush administration is doing is increasing the pressure on both Syria and Iran ... which is precisely the wrong thing to do if your goal is to stabilize Iraq.

I guess their theory is that the best defense is always a good offense, and astonishingly to me at a time when the American adventure in Iraq has gone completely and utterly off the track, rather than think about retreat, they're thinking about advance.

It reminds me of a piece in the Onion a while ago, which was a satire, saying that Bush announced that we were going to pull our troops out of Iraq, and that they were going to withdraw through Syria. That was a hilarious satire, but it seems to be almost exactly what some people in the administration are thinking.

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