‘The war against terrorism may last 10-15 years’
After the war in Iraq, do you think the Americans risk confronting problems like those that Israel faced in Lebanon and is currently facing on Palestinian territory? Without the war, Iraq would have been a terrible threat to the region. Saddam Hussein is the biggest murderer in modern history. In general, the phenomenon of terrorism in the Arab world represents a desperate reaction to modernity, an entanglement in traditional, mainly rural ways of life that are not viable in the contemporary world. I’m not saying that the Americans intervened in Iraq in order to give the Arab world access to modernity. They did it because after September 11 they had declared war on terrorism. In any case, their intervention has left the door open. Mahatma Gandhi said: «When a cat chases a mouse, you can’t demand a truce from the mouse. You have to persuade the cat to be a tiger, not a mouse.» Response That’s what the Americans are doing. [Bin] Laden attacked Bush, not the reverse. Bush had to respond – not to the Arabs, but to terrorism. I don’t know when the situation will stabilize in Iraq. The war on terrorism will take a long time, perhaps 10-15 years. But it is a challenge America cannot afford to dodge. The interviews in this article have been translated into English from Greek.
