Where were you on Sept. 11? How did that day affect you?

I was in Seattle -- or, actually, I was on the other side of Washington state, near the border of Idaho, giving a lesson on Kissinger. Scoop Jackson's old college, Whitman. I knew that the next morning the lawsuit against Henry Kissinger would be filed in Washington, D.C., by the Chilean victims, murder victims, or rather relatives of the murder victims. I signed a few books, had a few drinks, shook a few hands, went to bed feeling I'd done a fairly good day's work. I got woken up very early by my wife, told to turn on the TV. The plane flew into the Pentagon just opposite of where my daughter goes to school. I was at a very liberal college. And lots of people said things like: "Chickens coming home to roost." I realized very early in the day that I didn't believe a bit of that. But you know, I'm a mammal like everyone else. I went through disgust and rage -- not fear.

And then, by the end of the day I realized there was something I hadn't quite identified, it was another emotion waiting to dispose itself -- it was exhilaration. I thought, that's OK, that's a confrontation between everything I like and everything I don't like. You got an attack on civil society which indiscriminately kills people of every possible cultural denomination within the society. Upon examination this assault turns out to come from our client states, from the Saudi Arabian oligarchy to the Pakistani secret police, they're the ones that incubated them. It puts the working class in New York in the saddle. It puts them where they ought to be as the defenders of the country, of the requisite values. It completely exposes the national security state as being pointed the wrong way, and being top-heavy and corrupt. And it creates an international feeling that there has to be a stand made against the worst kind of tyranny that there ever could be, which is religious, the one that the socialist movement came into being to oppose, the religious worldview, it's what we exist to oppose, so people can actually emancipate themselves. You couldn't really have wanted a better and more dynamic and radical confrontation. And the American left decides: "Let's sit this one out." That's historical condemnation. To be neutral or indifferent about that, it's just giving up. You just want a quiet life.

But was that because --

It's the left turning into a very, very boring, banal, insular form of affectless conservatism and isolationism.

Why do you favor an invasion of Iraq?

I don't favor an invasion of Iraq. But I favor a confrontation with Saddam Hussein, and I've been an ally and a friend, a good enough friend, I hope, to the Kurdish and Iraqi opposition for many years. And I and they have been for regime change for a long time. When all Bushes were against it, and Carter too, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner who incited and paid and encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Iran, without, as far as I remember, a vote in the General Assembly about it, or Congress. So I've been involved with Iraq for more than 25 years, and Kurdistan. And I've had an unchanging view of it. I hope it can be done without an invasion.

Do you think it can be?

I think it can be, yes. I think the regime is close to imploding, as was demonstrated by the bizarre events of Sunday with the supposed amnesty [for Iraqi prisoners] that turned into somewhat like an uprising. The regime is already dead. It's necrotic. Any shove from any direction would collapse it. An Iraqi officer now has to be asking himself every day when he goes to bed and wakes up, "Do I want to be the last person to die for Saddam Hussein?" Obviously that thought is implanted from outside, by the certainty that something will happen. If it's true that there will be chaos in a post-Saddam Iraq -- that was going to be true in any case. The question is, can one have a hand in it and can you do something for the people you hope would win? The answer is yes to both.

But Karl Rove has as much as said that Bush can use this to his advantage in November.

It was a very grave mistake of his, morally as well as aesthetically and strategically, to say, because it invites people to refute it, and I hope with success. I hope that no candidate who runs that way is rewarded. I think there is an equivalent mistake or a symmetrical mistake in saying, "Well, it's being done for domestic reasons." Which is an unbelievably, insufferably insular comment. Because Bush is certainly gambling his presidency on this, and has to know -- because I know the people who are advising him, or some of them, know -- that the gamble might not work out. He could be facing a calamitous outcome, something that no prudent politician would ever embark on.

And you think he's aware of that potential for calamity?

He has to be.

Well, I think people wonder --

Most of the mainstream press and media spend most of their time emphasizing these dangers. They're quite right to do it. But they are wrong in thinking these dangers don't exist independently, so to speak, objectively. The problem of post-Saddam Iraq is a grave one, no matter how the post-Saddam stage is reached.

A question common among some leftists on this subject, just as it's common among some generals and retired generals, is whether you can devote yourself to taking out Saddam without compromising your attention to the war on terrorism and al-Qaida.

In both cases, the question is thrust on you. Take the third case: How can you deal with North Korea without distracting attention? It was obviously a very unwelcome piece of news. But it's not one that we can say, "Well, why don't we concentrate on the other things as if this hadn't happened?" The question of a post-Saddam Iraq is a very urgent one. We don't have the option of saying, let's pretend it's not so and get after bin Laden. And by the way, the damage done to the bin Laden network I think has been very considerable. I think bin Laden is dead. We know the Taliban is gone and can't come back.

Although al-Qaida's been pretty active in the past couple of weeks, don't you think?

This is the kind of thing -- I lived in London and I worked in Belfast during the hot period of the war in Ireland. You were used to a bomb in a restaurant every week or so. It was a regular thing. Any fool can do it. You can blow up a restaurant in America every week -- it wouldn't make the slightest difference. It will come to that anyway. If it's a war, there will certainly be regular shooting from the other side. But al-Qaida doesn't have a host country anymore, and its leader is I think dead, and a lot of its militants are dead too, and it will become a lot easier to identify and kill them as time goes by. That has to be done in any case. So it would be like saying, 'If North Korea invaded South Korea, we shouldn't do anything about it because we have to concentrate on al-Qaida.'

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