JY: Of course it's a reasonable question, but the answer is unreasonable. ... I think what we've seen in 9/11 was that a lot of mistakes, sloppy mistakes, were made. Different organizations within the intelligence community ... weren't cooperating with each other.

One of the things that I think we often lose sight of in the post-9/11 world is that the job of the Justice Department and the FBI is to pursue justice. ... The mission of the intelligence community is to gather information. ... Those are two entirely separate missions. ... When you mix intelligence with a law-and-justice organization, the one can muddy the waters for the other.

JY: That's part of it. ... You can't ensure that [9/11] will never happen again. I think that if you'd have had the best system in the world in 2001, you probably could not have prevented it. ... If it hadn't been that, it would have been something else, because I think that our mechanisms for dealing with this just can't catch it all.

JY: Unfortunately, that's one of the things that we are living through, I think, in this current Iraq crisis. ... Here's the issue: Politicization of intelligence is a very dangerous thing. There's two kinds of it. One is where an analyst ... is told, encouraged or understands that they've got to shape their analysis in a certain way to fit policy. I never had to do that, and it would be a terrible thing if people did; it would be wrong. But there's another kind of politicization that is equally onerous, and that is where you have ... policymakers who decide they don't like the intelligence they're getting, so they're going to set up their own intelligence-gathering mission, and they're going to throw in people who may not be intelligence specialists.

JY: It's the policy part of the Pentagon ... saying, "We would like to go back and review all the intelligence on Iraqi support for terrorism, just to see what did we know and when did we know it, and if we did know, why didn't we believe it?"

JY: It is a complicated country. Iraqis are very proud. They're proud of their history. They are nationalists. We're trying to deal with them as if they're not, but one thing I learned in my thesis research is that Iraqis have a very strong sense of who they are and where they are. And one thing which has always struck me is ... very few people get to relive their Ph.D. thesis over and over again. When I worked on Iraq [at the U of I], I worked on the Arab revolt of 1920 which involved the Shia and Sunni revolt against the British occupation of Iraq. Years later I would do it again in 1991, and I'd be repeating it again today. ... You see history, in that sense, ... does repeat itself. There are lessons to be learned from history about how the Iraqis will view things.

JY: The way I figure most Iraqis feel is, "Thank you very much for getting rid of Saddam Hussein. We know we couldn't do it ourselves. We're grateful, thank you very much, but why are you still here?" Because gratitude is a short-lived thing.

JY: The problem is that the high expectations that [the Iraqis and the Americans have] cannot be fulfilled quickly. ... What if what actually happens is far less than that which is anticipated - and you know, it's guaranteed to be that; it always is.

JY: The thing is this: If you've never used a toothbrush in your life, and somebody hands you a toothbrush — what do I do with this? ... There's a story about one of our senior military officers who was in charge of [a] town ... in southern Iraq. He went in with his commander's fund, saying, "OK, I've got X amount of money. What would you like me to do with it? Do we build schools, hospitals, roads, whatever? You decide. You are empowered." And they looked at him, and they said, "We want television. ... That's how we get our messages, our orders of what to do." Baghdad would broadcast them. And could they think of an alternative way, that they didn't have to wait for that any more? You see, in that sense democratic practices are learned experiences. You just don't jump into it overnight. And if anybody thought they would, that was fantasy.

JY: I worry about it. If Iraq becomes a failed state, if it goes to civil war or warlordism or chaos, it's going to be very dangerous to itself. It'll be a danger in the region; it could spark other kinds of opportunistic fighting from its neighbors. And ultimately it will become, I think, that thing which I think we fear the most ... a safe haven for terrorists and other opportunistic groups who we'll have to confront further down the road. We don't want Iraq to become [the Taliban-ruled] Afghanistan with oil. That's a scary thought, isn't it?

JY: The next year or two or more are going to be very difficult, whatever government comes in to Iraq. ... Then or even for a while [after its elections], Iraq is going to be a weak government. It's a weak state; we don't want it to become a failed state.