The American habit of napping just before a war starts

But it's clear that neither [Presidents Bush Sr. nor Clinton] decided to go that way. Obviously that's probably more apropos of the Clinton years, because I think you could make the case that the time when that threat was on the rise was somewhere between '93 and 2001. I've been in a room, where [Clinton] post-presidency has said that he was obsessed by bin Laden. If he was, and I think he's telling the truth, it's quite possible that to certain agencies in the government, he gave out a view of being obsessed. And I gather that he gave the green light on a willingness to assassinate him. But in the larger sense of turning the country and the government to share his obsession, no, there's nothing on that.

As a cultural observer, can you compare this time to a previous time?

In terms of the kind of war it's going to be, and the kind of struggle it is, it's more like the heightened part of the cold war, the harsher part. It's not really like World War II, but in terms of drawing a line between the way we used to be and the way we are now, I think that part is parallel to Pearl Harbor.

Does the mood of America have an impact on foreign policy?

Foreign policy is always driven by domestic concerns and attitudes. That's one of the things I tried to show in the "The Best and the Brightest" and in the new book. Foreign policy is not a pure, abstract science. It is something that is first and foremost derivative of domestic political equations.

There's been some talk about similarities between Afghanistan and Vietnam. Do you think that's fair?

I'd be very, very careful of making those comparisons. First off, in Vietnam, we got ourselves involved in what was a continuum of civil war and a war for independence, an anticolonial war. And we went seeking it; this is a war that has sought us. And obviously there are some real dangers - nobody who knows anything about Afghanistan wants to lightly employ American ground troops there. The lessons learned by the Russians are self-evident. One of the most important pieces of journalism that I've read since Sept. 11 is a piece in The Washington Post. Susan Glasser did a great interview with about five or six Russian generals who fought there, and their description is of not a graveyard, but a boneyard.

In terms of the decline in international reporting in recent years, did Americans lose interest, or did journalists not sell the stories well?

Obviously Americans paid less and less attention because they felt less threatened. There was a belief that the private sector had all the answers and that foreign policy was no longer a hot piece of territory anymore. But the blame obviously goes to the media and particularly to television because on the part of any serious journalistic institution there's an ancient rule - and that is that a great journalist, a great editor, balances what people want to know with what they need to know. And certainly the networks just didn't do that.

What difference would it have made now if there had been more coverage?

We would have been more up to speed in terms of getting our intelligence forces up to speed. We'd be better off in terms of domestic security. I think we lost four or five years in there. As we looked away, we diminished ourselves and made ourselves a little more vulnerable. There are people who believe that the classic example is the moment the Russians were driven out of Afghanistan - we, who had helped supply these [resistance] forces and trained them, turned away and orphaned them.... The more serious the media is in terms of covering foreign policy, the better the debate is nationally, and the better the government performs.

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