You mention your experience in the White House during Vietnam. We've started to hear people talk about parallels between this conflict and that one. Now, it doesn't seem possible that this war will go on even a fraction that long. But what parallels, or lack of parallels, do you see?

I think it's a very dangerous analogy, particularly on the military front. I don't believe there's any way the United States will get bogged down in Iraq for five, 10, 12 years. I'm no military expert, but I don't think that can happen. I mean, only Baghdad is left. One way or another, you can wait them out or go in and then weed them out. Militarily, we're not there for a long time.

Now, politically I think the analogy works. I heard Jim Webb, the former secretary of the Navy, who was in Vietnam as a Marine and worked for the "MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour" 20 years ago, on CBS the other day. Bob Schieffer asked him, "You wrote this big piece that was skeptical of the war, back in September for the Washington Post. Why?" Jim Webb said, "I covered Lebanon for the 'News Hour' [when a U.S. Marine barracks was blown up, killing 241 soldiers]. And I came out and I realized we should never be in this region permanently. This is not like any other part of the world."

I heard a terrific interview on NPR's "On the Media" yesterday with a British journalist I've never heard of -- I'm trying to track him down -- who said that this is having a profound unintended consequence. It's creating the first real pan-Arabism he had seen in a long time.

Since Nasser, maybe.

That's exactly what he said. So politically, the analogy with Vietnam is appropriate. Although we got out of Vietnam politically at the same time we got out militarily, we will not be able to get out of the Middle East politically at the same time we get out of Iraq militarily. The whole issue of reconstruction and nation-building that they're talking about, although I'm not sure how serious that is, could bog us down for a long time.

I did a little piece at the end of last week's broadcast, a little essay. I saw the headline, "Marines cross the Euphrates." And it just hit me, because my graduate work was in theology and I had to take five years of Greek, so I studied all that history -- so did Alexander the Great! So I went back to the books and, sure enough, 5,000 years ago the story is the same. The defeat of this one, the victory of that one. The Marines cross the Euphrates, but the United States will not be able to get out. And the last word is always written in the sand.

So yes, the military analogy breaks down -- there's no way Iraq can hold out for 10 years or five years or even a year. But you can be in an Israeli-like situation in the Middle East that will make life very, very miserable.

And every day we're there increases the pan-Arabism, gives the other side, the extremist Muslims, their argument. The Saudis are allowing their press, which is very controlled, to start chastising America. And the clerics in Saudi Arabia, who've been kept quiet since 9/11, have been allowed to go back to the pulpit and castigate America. At the same time, the targeting of Iraq is taking place from an underground bunker in Saudi Arabia. I mean, the Saudis are playing both ends against each other. That may last for the moment. But one of the main reasons that Osama bin Laden and the extremist Muslims give for their resentment of America is the stationing of American troops near the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. We didn't have anything like that situation in Vietnam.

Is this period of history -- the collapse of communism and the triumph of global capitalism, the troublesome 2000 election, moving through 9/11 to the current crisis -- one of those fulcrums of history that our children or grandchildren will look back on and say, that changed the direction of the world?

I believe that. I won't be around to see it, but I definitely believe this is a defining period of history. The last third of the 20th century created a kind of political certainty in the world, in this sense: There was the Cold War, which enabled two superpowers, wary of each other, to keep the other stable, to keep the other checked. There was a delicate balance -- there was the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin airlift -- but the Cold War kept velvet gloves over much of the world. There were lots of bad things happening, but it did keep a certain kind of equilibrium in the world.

The other great phenomenon that came in the last half of the 20th century was the rise of the welfare state, with the sense of obligation growing out of the collapse of capitalism in the 1920s -- we had certain obligations one to another, there was a need for the government to intervene to correct gross inequalities in income and health and opportunity.

Both of those have gone now. The Cold War is over and the United States has risen as the great military power, which always brings consequences that powers don't want. And the collapse of the social contract -- the rise of the right wing, the rise of the corporate right and the political right in this country, which exercises hegemony now over our government -- is turning the market into every man for himself. Those two forces, disorder in the world and disorder at home, are creating appetites and responses and challenges and frustrations and angers and passions and winners and losers, and nobody can anticipate how they will reshape themselves. And the other factor, of course, is the rise of Islamic uniformity or conformity or whatever one wants to call it.

Yeah, I think we are in a very disturbing period. I've never seen anything like it. I've lived through the Depression, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, the rise of the conservative movement, the nuclear age, all of these changes. I've never seen anything like this.

You bring up Islamic fundamentalism, and we hear a lot of different things about that. Some people argue it's actually on the wane, while others, including some on the left like Paul Berman, feel that it's the new face of fascism. Do you feel that extreme Islam is actually the primary force opposing the United States and global capitalism right now?

I don't think it's the dominant force. I think fundamentalism is found around the world, whether in the Jewish occupation of the West Bank or the rise of the religious right in this country or Islamic fundamentalism, although they're not all necessarily the same. What we're seeing is the inevitable backlash to globalization, to the dominance of American ideas and American money and American goods and services. That's what's creating the backlash. Militant Islam gives it its front teeth, gives a bite to it.

We covered a story on "Now" last year about the backlash in Bolivia to the efforts by Bechtel to privatize the water supply. That was very powerful, what happened there -- 10,000 people rising up to protest the privatization of water! We would never have heard about that, probably, or factored it into our considerations of world dynamics. But once the teeth of Islam snapped on 9/11, all of us begin to wake up to other things going on in the world. Why aren't we seen as the benevolent force that we think of ourselves as? The benign force that Thomas Friedman wrote about in "The Lexus and the Olive Tree," assuming that's what the world wanted.

We suddenly discovered that this increasing inequality is not what the world wanted. We did a piece about Arundhati Roy in India -- here's a novelist who forgoes writing, to become an activist to stop these huge dams that were being built and displacing millions of people in central Asia. It turned out Enron had a big role in that, using American influence to bribe government officials. We probably wouldn't have paid much attention to that until we woke up on 9/11, specifically in regard to the terrorists, but also in regard to others out there. We began to look at ourselves in a mirror that they had thrust in our face.

I think most extremist groups run their gamut, and the Wahhabists and the others will also, although we're facing a long, tough time. I think the real phenomenon that is reshaping our world is that globalization breeds such inequalities. There is bound to be a reaction to it on many fronts.

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