Robert Stone: "History has come for us"

I honestly don't know. In a way the worst setup we could have is all these elderly oil men -- Cheney and so forth, the people who run the country -- in a way they are the last people we should have as our leadership right now. They are like the Bourbons -- they remember nothing and forget nothing. I don't know what we can do; truly, there are ways in which this government, or the country, has become so utterly devoid of community ... A lot of people abroad think that we leave people to starve in the street. We are not as bad as who we are often thought of as being, but I think it's still pretty bad. I think the federal government could do a lot that it is not doing.

In a lot of ways I think I've become more left-wing than I used to be, because I was always a kind of cold warrior. I mean, I always criticized the Cold War and its paradoxes but when the chips were down I knew which side fundamentally I was always on. I didn't have illusions about Marxist ideology. But now, I don't know, I certainly don't believe in Marxist ideology, but I find the American system a scandal in its indifference to poor people and working people, and I think also our perception of the world remains very, very unsophisticated. You hear Adm. Stufflebeem or these other men, they do not seem to have the necessary flexibility of spirit, the necessary irony, the necessary perception and thoughtfulness to do what they are doing, to deal with the machinations of the people that they have made their enemy. We were always going to end up being their enemy; I don't think we are to blame for that. But they seem naive.

Even in the context of what appears to be victory, at least for now?

I think they have a problem in what they call in business their corporate culture. I think that is a problem and remains a problem: their ability to identify and discuss their aims, to transfer into language and hence into politics their role as military men. We know from Clausewitz that war is politics -- and this inability to verbalize and to articulate is a political liability; it is part of a problem of military corporate culture, and I think that remains. I still think there is a lack of a certain worldliness on the part of the American military and I think that is true of the masters of this administration. I question their flexibility and adeptness. But I will be happy to see them resolve this.

The long-term situation, particularly in Palestine, seems to be pretty hopeless.

It really does. I used to be more hopeful than I am. The thing is everybody's plans have gone to hell, I mean everybody's initial plans have gone to hell. The Arabs in the former Palestine, the Palestinians, imagined that since they outnumbered the Jews so considerably, that eventually when Arab nationalism struck, they would, if not drive the settlers out, come to dominate them. And then on the other side, the Zionist side, there was an expectation that something like what happened after the war between Greece and Turkey would happen, that there would be a population transfer -- this was hoped for back in the '30s -- that maybe the British could pull it off, that [the Arabs] might in fact be transferred to another territory. That was always part of the program; that was always hoped. Both sides were hoping for the impossible. Both sides were hoping that they were going to win thoroughly, that they were going to win everything and no provision was ever made for what we think of as the 21st century solution, which is a multicultural, multiethnic state.

In "A Flag for Sunrise," the protagonist, Holliwell, is seeking in Central America "people who believed in things, and acted in the world according to what they believed." In all your books, it seems characters are on that kind of quest. But in thinking about Afghanistan, one could say that the Taliban fit that description of people who believe, and bin Laden might fit that description. But do we?

No, we certainly don't. I don't think we can quite imagine that degree of belief. I keep getting back to that line of Yeats, in "The Second Coming": "The best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity." But can you really call these people the worst? I don't know -- they certainly don't see themselves as the worst; they see themselves as sublime martyrs who have lived heroic lives.

I find [all this] absolutely fascinating but I also find it very, very frightening. I think there is a lot to be scared of in the contemporary world. History has come for us, it's here; what we feared is beginning to happen to us. And I have to say that I'm very much afraid that the next one of the bombs that goes off is not going to be a conventional bomb; I think that they are going to put it together in some safe house in Jersey.

People back in the '80s in Cairo were saying that one day there will be an Islamic bomb, and one day Islam will be able to go nuclear. And I think that day is very close. And I can't see why -- having done what they did, having killed all those people -- they would stop at nuclear weapons. So maybe, if by reacting the way we reacted we deterred them, we deterred somebody like bin Laden from using a nuclear bomb against us in the thought that he might not want to see a city in Islam nuked in retaliation, maybe then what we did wasn't so off base.

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