A history of violence

Are there any politicians on the national stage who seem to be articulating foreign policy ideas vis-à-vis Islam and violent fundamentalism that are well informed by history and the kind of mistakes you write about in "Devil's Game"?

Not that I can see.

I think one of the lessons of my book is that for the last 60 years the United States has had a pathetically ill-informed notion of how this part of the world works. And even the people who pretend to be most informed sometimes are the most wrong-headed.

I guess the big gap is, there are professionals in the State Department and the intelligence community who have, I think, pretty clear ideas about the facts on the ground and how these societies are organized, but what I've found is that there's an almost complete disconnect between their expertise and the politicians who make the decisions. And I don't know how to solve that problem.

Is that a disconnect that you think has always been there, or has it gotten much worse since the election of Bush in 2000?

I think it's always been there, at about the same level. The difference is that I don't think we've ever launched a preventative unilateral war before. That's the perfect case study because virtually everyone who knew anything about Iraq was against the invasion of Iraq before the war. And the Catch-22 is that, because they were against the war, by virtue of knowing something about Iraq, they were considered untrustworthy by the Bush administration's planners. That left the planning of the war, by definition, to people who didn't know anything about Iraq. And that's true really in every decade of our policy toward the Middle East, to a greater or lesser degree, and really I think that's the core lesson from my book.

Is there a politician who's given real thoughtful consideration to this kind of stuff? Not that I can see, because, so far at least, the political consequences would be fatal. You'd have to come out against the war on terrorism, number one -- at least as it's currently conceived, and number two, you'd have to come out against America's one-sided support for Israel. And either one of those stands politically would be dangerous but both of them together would be fatal for most politicians -- or at least that's how they see it.

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James Norton was the Middle East editor for the Christian Science Monitor during the first year of the Iraq war. His new book, "Saving General Washington," comes out next spring.

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