Colleagues will malign you if you're a moderately successful journalist.

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.

Tanks come in two forms: the dangerous, deadly kind and the 'liberating' kind.

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.

Bin Laden is not well read and he’s not sophisticated, but he will have worked out very coldly what America would do.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Clinton impressed Assad: a young man who appeared to want to be neutral in the Arab-Israeli dispute – an illusion of course, but that’s what Assad thought.