Rangel and others in the Democratic Party have raised sharp objections to Bush's war plans, but what do you think in general of the Democrats' response on this issue? Have they presented a coherent alternative?

I'm disgusted at the Democratic Party -- what a bunch of weasels. The senators laid down flat in the weeks before the fall election and voted without a full debate over Iraq. That was the moment for a searching national discussion, no matter what the outcome. And since the Democrats rolled over, of course Bush was right to proceed -- they gave him carte blanche.

The Democrats should have provided the geopolitical analysis that the Republicans were avoiding. In countries like Turkey that have reluctantly agreed to let U.S. forces use their territory as a staging ground, for example, there's a sharp disconnect between these government decisions and what the mass of people think and feel. And we don't need that -- a situation where moderate governments are overthrown by a rising tide of Islamic radicalism.

I have a long view of history -- my orientation is archaeological because I'm always thinking in terms of ancient Greece and Rome, ancient Persia and Egypt. People are much too complacent in the West -- though their comfort level has been shaken (as I predicted long ago in Salon) by the stock market drop. Most professional people in the West do not understand the power of Islamic fundamentalism. Westerners dismissed Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini -- "Oh, how medieval; our modern culture will triumph over that!" But guess what: Ever since Khomeini, Islamic fundamentalism has been spreading and spreading right to our front door.

It's similar to early Christianity. Christianity began as a religion of the poor and dispossessed -- farmers, fishermen, Bedouin shepherds. There's a great lure to that kind of simplicity and rigor -- the discipline, the call to action. There's a kind of rapturous idealism to it. No one thought in the first century after Christ that this slave religion would triumph over the urbane sophisticates of the ancient Roman world. Taking the long view, I think Islamic radicalism is the true threat, not Saddam Hussein's arsenal. At the worst, Saddam's biological or chemical weapons could take out a neighborhood or send a drifting poison cloud through a city. But what I'm talking about is a movement so massive it could bring down the West -- the entire civilization of the West. No one thought that imperial Egypt or Rome would fall -- but they did.

So do you agree with Oriana Fallaci's characterization of the war on terrorism as a clash of civilizations?

Before 9/11, I would never have believed it, but I do now. For years I was saying that the study of world religions in higher education will lead us toward mutual understanding and world peace and so on and so forth. Well, the attack on the World Trade Center opened my eyes. After a decade of government neglect of this issue, we now face an entire generation of ruthless young Islamic men who have been radicalized. The solution is not to bomb Baghdad but to win over the Muslim center, which has been alarmingly passive. We need a cultural war -- one certainly enforced by targeted military strikes and espionage directed at terror cells and leaders, like the Predator attack on that jeep in Yemen. Boom! Perfect -- out of nowhere comes a missile that takes them out. Fantastic! We need small, mobile units of special forces deployed everywhere, stealth operatives -- kidnapping terrorists and debriefing and neutralizing them. Undercover activity is the way to go. But this kind of conventional war that Bush has planned for Iraq won't get to the root of the problem. All Bush is doing is shifting moderate Muslims in sympathy toward the radical extreme.

There may be an apparent immediate victory in Iraq, but we'll be winning the battle and losing the war. The real war is for the hearts and minds of the Islamic world. We don't want a world where Americans can't travel abroad without fearing for their lives -- or even within our borders, where a small cell of fanatics can blow up a railway station or bridge or tunnel.

You mentioned that you don't think much of Rumsfeld -- how about the other members of the Bush foreign policy and national security team. What do you think about Condi Rice, for instance?

I've been a longtime admirer of Condoleezza Rice, because I like her articulateness and style -- her toughness and rigor. However, she might be a great national security advisor, but I'm not sure she has the touch and finesse that are needed for international relations. I like how she huddles with Bush to watch football and hash out strategy. She's got a military mind. I love her steeliness, but there's something a little harsh in her view of the world. She lacks the human touch. There's something a little off-putting about someone who has no evident romantic relationships, who sees life as basically a chessboard. One of the great moments in American politics would be if Cheney is out as V.P. the next time around, and Bush puts Rice -- a black woman -- on the ticket. That would put Hillary in her place! [laughs]

What do you think of Colin Powell's role these days?

It's not very clear, is it? It goes back and forth. He's caught in the middle, so that his public image has become blurred. His language is usually so bland and vacuous that he's drowned out by Rumsfeld. By the time Powell made his presentation of hard evidence to the U.N. Security Council this week, he had a credibility problem. His words no longer had the weight they once had. The administration should have been publishing reconnaissance photos six months ago. After all this buildup, I was hoping to see something more formidable than amateurish peekaboo games by Saddam's underlings.

It doesn't seem that Rice or any other member of the Bush inner team has spent any real time in the Mideast.

No, they have no visceral feeling for the people of that complex region. The Middle East has been a seething crucible for thousands of years. All the border lines there are provisional -- they're always being drawn and redrawn. So this is madness -- even trying to sustain Iraq as a national entity after destroying Saddam's tyranny. Iraq is just a self-serving idea that the British had at the end of the Ottoman empire. It's a cauldron of warring tribesmen. Clinton never understood this either -- about the Mideast or the Balkans. He just wanted everyone to get along. What naiveté! The fierce animosities, the blood memory in those parts of the world. I understand it from my family background in Italy. We have long memories: Things that happened decades or centuries ago are as vivid as today -- it's tribal memory. That's what the Bush administration is missing about Iraq. They think that destroying Saddam will create a nation of happy Iraqis.

Another thing is that Saddam thinks of himself as the heir of Babylon and Assyria. Most Americans don't understand the pride that he and his people have in that history. They want to revive it. It's exactly the way Americans take pride in our roots and our founding fathers and want to spread American values around the world. It looks illogical to the Arab world when we say, "Well, of course we have thousands of nuclear weapons, but you can't have any." They don't see why the U.S. thinks it can decide which sovereign nations should have nuclear weapons and which cannot.

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