But why Iraq now? Why can't it wait a year? Why can't it wait even two years? I mean, the time is arbitrary --

Anyone who wants to give Saddam Hussein more time is inviting him to get to the stage where he could say, well, I've reoccupied Kuwait, and if you want to push me out, be aware that I can let off a nuclear weapon in Saudi Arabia's oil fields. I wouldn't want to bet my own house, let alone anyone else's, on that.

Do you find much opposition to these positions, particularly regarding Iraq? And especially on the left?

The main enemies of my position -- the chief enemy is not Tom Daschle, who everyone knew would collapse and fall into line, and who had anyway got up to the same point of saying, "Let's hit Iraq now," when it was Clinton asking for it. The opposition of him and Robert Byrd is trivial, sham, something for the New York Times to write about. Everybody knew they would fall into line in the end. They would make a few noises, but they'd already for another president made the same commitments. They just wanted to give it to Bush. Trivial. And nobody gives a shit outside a small constituency what Chomsky thinks anymore, or Ramsey Clark. The main enemies of this regime-change strategy are Bush senior, [retired Gen. Brent] Scowcroft, [former Secretary of State Lawrence] Eagleburger, to some extent Kissinger -- status quo forces, who like the Middle East the way it is, basically, clientele of Saudi Arabia -- and the isolationist right, Pat Buchanan. And their language of prudence and caution and so on has a lot of echoes in the State Department and some in the CIA and Pentagon. The people who were so useful to us in defending us against al-Qaida. So it's an argument with the conservatives. And this, more than any foreign policy argument has ever been, in fact, it's an argument with the imperial conservatives, the Tories, and that's simply obscured to a lot of people I think by the apparent objection of pacifists and liberals which doesn't make any difference.

Although it's --

And then are those who claim to be pacifists -- they at least have a conscience about the Palestinians, a very important question -- but who I think are being deceived. And then there are those who say, "Well, safety first. Prudence." But it's not clear to me their policy is the more secure one. As for the Palestinians, well, I've been banging on about the Palestinians for three decades, when a lot of the left thought it was too awkward a question to bring up. And I wouldn't take any of that back, either. But if you say you can't do anything about Iraq until the Palestine question is settled, you're saying that the oldest dispute in the Middle East must be settled before you can do anything about Saddam Hussein, which is giving him a lot of room and time and notice and giving him the incentive to sabotage, which he has the partial power to do, any such settlement from occurring. So it may very well be that those who care for the Palestinians should think of it the other way around. At least it's as good as the other argument, which has been given a fair try and has not worked. It's resulted in the Arafat faction and the rejectionists always knowing they've got someone else to turn to in Baghdad, for money and for weapons. Without that, they might have to do what they keep saying they won't do, which is make a deal. That's another gamble, I'll admit. It could go wrong. But I think the existing gamble is set in time and schedule to go wrong -- it can't work.

So you see an invasion of Iraq as potentially having positive repercussions in the Israeli-Palestine --

I would prefer to call it an intervention against Saddam Hussein. I think it has many possible unintended consequences that are good. They're the reason why the conservatives oppose it. One, it destroys the Saudi Arabian monopoly on oil. That's why Kissinger spoke up against it. It upsets the Turkish oligarchy because, in theory at any rate and possibly in practice, it enlarges the nucleus or the embryo we already have of a Kurdish autonomous state. It takes at least a bit of bet on the possibility that the Iraqi people could produce a better regime than they have. It's destabilizing, yeah, but that's what I like about it.

The New York Daily News, in a recent column by Stanley Crouch, suggested that you've left the left. The National Review in the last few days said that Christopher Hitchens is no man of the right, but that "We will be in the same trench for years to come." Do you believe these assessments of your political evolution? Have you left the left?

Both are making the same mistake in a different way. Stanley used, in his youth, to be a keen revolutionary black nationalist and very much isn't anymore. And so I think he welcomes company from defectors of any kind. And he's repudiated his past, which I haven't and don't. And the same would be true of the National Review. I mean, I didn't read that, nor have I read what's in today's New York Post [National Review Online, actually], where I'm told William F. Buckley Jr. has a very long attack on me and my Kissinger film and I believe also the book. I haven't read it but I know it's apparently a full-out attack. So we're not going to be in the same trenches, are we?

Let me put it in a different way: On the one hand your position on Iraq seems to be a position adopted by many people who are close to Bush, and as a measure that is integral to Israel's security, which is an unusual position for you to be in, historically. You've been an outspoken critic of Israel. Second, it puts you in an alliance -- not with Brent Scowcroft and not the various other generals, but with John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle and that cadre close to Bush. Isn't that an unusual position --

It says to me, look, there is no position now on these matters that doesn't involve the handling of contradiction. All people's positions bring them into alignments they would never have believed they would have. In other words, shall we say, Noam Chomsky and Patrick Buchanan. Or Alexander Cockburn and Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. By the way, I'm very glad to find that those are the ways the planets have aligned for me. I'm not just a critic of Israel, actually. I'm an anti-Zionist. I'm one of those people of Jewish descent who believes that Zionism would be a mistake even if there were no Palestinians, which is a great lie of Zionism, that there is no Palestinian population. The bet made by the Wolfowitz-Perle group is that an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians would be more easily done if the Middle East were cleansed of authoritarian extremist regimes than if it were not. Well, we've given the other proposition a fairly fair test, and I think that it's been a failure.

Last question --

I should say that I think that there should've been a Palestinian state 25 years ago and it's a matter of principle that the Palestinians should have their own self-government, whether that helps with Iraq or not. I think it's a matter of principle and should be approached in that way. But since no U.S. government was going to do that, and since Bush is the only president to have used the words "Palestinian" and "state" next to each other, I don't see any reason yet to think his position is worse. And the resort by the Palestinians -- some of the leadership and well as some of the rank-and-file -- to suicide bombing, I think, had to be presented to them, without any ambivalence, as something that would be suicidal for them.

Is there a left out there that you are still a part of?

No. I don't actually think there's a left in America really at all, now. The term "the American left" is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics. It has some memories it can be proud of. It has some veterans who I'm proud to know. But it isn't really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is. Whether or not it revives, I think, is very problematic.

Why --

I hope it would be clear to anyone who reads this that I don't feel I wasted all my time on the left. That I still think as an internationalist and as a socialist in what you might call the intellectual, the ethical way -- I still do. And I accept also the risks of revolutionary strategy even if it's only a revolution from above. So that, to that extent, I feel much more as I used to in the '60s, having meetings with the Iraqi opposition and the Kurdish rebels, than I would marching under a banner saying "Leave Saddam Hussein alone." Actually it's for them to ask whether they think there's a left or whether they are in fact just a creepy form of the status quo who've made all their own adjustments to power but are still preserving an outdated rhetoric.

Last question: Ten words or less, tell me what your politics are.

I feel emancipated by the lack of any party or ideological allegiance.

Emancipated and not lonely?

Well, loneliness was always -- if you've ever been, as a I nearly was once, a full-time organizer for a group that is a minority within the Trotskyist movement, isolation has no terror. I have to be careful, in other words -- this is more than 10 words -- of not succumbing to the view that being on your own may mean you're right. That of course can be the first sign of madness. [laughs]

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