What I wrote was that the shah always falls in the end, Saddam always turns on you, and the Saudis always betray you. If we support evil, the long-term price is almost always too high. And now we don't have to. Since 1989, or '91, depending on how you want to date it, we've been the only superpower. We haven't thought about what we've been doing...

I'd like to see us go back to where it is possible, within the realistic limitations of geostrategy, to support plebiscites so that people can agree on whom they want to live with or who should be their leader. I would like to see us on the side of human rights. We talk about human rights very selectively. We beat up on Burma because we don?t have any trade with it, but Saudi Arabia's abuses of human rights have been vastly worse, and we don't say boo. Sometimes in the short term, as with Turkey, which is our big aircraft carrier in the Middle East, we have to go softly, but even with Turkey we could talk tougher behind the scenes. Human rights should always be one of the pillars of our foreign policy. I want America to be on the side of the downtrodden, the huddled masses, the tired and the poor. Why not?

The United States seems almost like an organic response to the problem of empire.