There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 11 September attacks. There was nothing demonstrating or showing that something was coming in the United States. If there had been something, we would have acted on it.

We were spending American blood and treasure to liberate the people of Afghanistan from one of the most brutal regimes on the face of the earth. That we would not use that moment to press for women's rights seems to me unthinkable.

People notice if you are black. People notice if you are female. We are certainly not either colorblind or gender-blind in this country, so I'm not suggesting that it isn't a factor. But I think in the final analysis, people will take a look at the positions, and they'll take a look at the issues.

Some governments choose to cooperate with the United States in intelligence, law enforcement, or military matters. The co-operation is a two-way street. We share intelligence that has helped protect European countries from attack, helping save European lives.

I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.

What we have to do is to definitively remove the last vestiges of power from those who treat terms such as 'liberal democracy,' 'free markets' and 'Europe' with suspicion.

I think the Bush Administration had basically inherited a policy toward Iraq from the Reagan/Bush Administration that saw Iraq as a kind of fire wall against Iranian fundamentalism. And as it developed over the 1980s, it became a real political run-a-muck... even though the Iraqis were known to be harboring Palestinian terrorists.

I came up in a time where the assumption was, in the '60s and '70s, where the federal government was a great agent of progressive social change, it was the intervener in the best sense, and it would come and address injustice forthrightly.