It is always an eerie experience to sit among Bashar al-Assad’s soldiers.
I do not make stories up, full stop.
President Bush cruelly manipulated the grief of the American people – and the sympathy of the rest of the world – to introduce a ‘world order’ dreamed up by a clutch of fantasists advising the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.
Individuals in various countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia listen to the tapes of bin Laden. They gather in groups of four or five. They feel they want to do something to express their support for what they’ve heard. The idea that they were taking orders is a particularly Western idea.
The sheer violence of it, the howl of air raid sirens and the air-cutting fall of the missiles carried its own political message; not just to President Saddam but to the rest of the world. We are the superpower, those explosions said last night. This is how we do business.
And it’s true, you hear things in Damascus and, after a few hours, the human double-take stops operating.
We live in a society in the West, where, when men do violent things, they do them under orders. They are soldiers carrying out orders or mafia men carrying out killings for bosses. But the way things happen in the Middle East is not the same as in the West.
I suppose, in the end, we journalists try – or should try – to be the first impartial witnesses of history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: ’we didn’t know – no one told us.
And history s fingers never relax their grip, never leave us unmolested, can touch us even when we would never imagine their presence.
I don’t know what happens if they get bin Laden. I’m much more interested in what happens if they don’t get bin Laden.
When you have a crime against humanity that is so awesome in scale and death, it is more than permissible to look around and say, who recently has been declaring war on the United States? Of course, the compass points straight to bin Laden.
Tanks come in two forms: the dangerous, deadly kind and the “liberating” kind.
President Bush will come here and there will be new “friends” of America to open a new relationship with the world, new economic fortunes for those who “liberated” them.
At the end of the day, bin Laden’s interest is not Washington and New York, it’s the Middle East. He wants Saudi Arabia. He wants to get rid of the House of Saud.
Bin Laden is not well read and he’s not sophisticated, but he will have worked out very coldly what America would do.
When I saw the pictures of New York without the World Trade Center, New York looked like a shadow of itself.
It’s very easy to start a war but the muftah, as the Arabs say, the key to switch off a war, is very difficult to find.
Bin Laden was very keen to point out to me that his forces had fought the Americans in Somalia. He also wanted to talk about how many mullahs in Pakistan were putting up posters saying, “We follow bin Laden.” He even produced a sort of Kodak set of snapshots of graffiti supporting him.
Bin Laden was constantly revolving in his mind the fact that he had got rid of the Russians; therefore, the Americans can be got rid of, too. And where better than in the country where he knows how to fight?
Fundamentalism is not bred in poverty. There are plenty of poor countries in the world that don’t have violence because amid the poverty there is a kind of justice and in some countries a democracy.
Governments like it that way. They want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, “them” and “us,” victory or defeat. But war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.