For four decades, exiled Pakistani historian Tariq Ali has written nonfiction, novels, plays, and even an opera challenging injustices of Islamic and Western cultures alike. His latest book is Bush in Babylon: The Recolonization of Iraq (Verso, $20.00). He'll be speaking in Seattle Dec. 5-6 (see calendar, back page). Last week, ETS! co-editor Geov Parrish reached him at his home in London.

G.P.: How would you summarize the common themes that unite the many topics of your political books, editing, novels, plays, and other creative work over the years?

T.A.: The unifying theme of all my work is a blend of history, culture and politics. In Anglo-Saxon culture not a few critics regard this as an undrinkable cocktail. It doesn't bother me at all. I've always been engaged, and even the thought of "writing to please" induces nausea.

Initially I concentrated on writing history: two books on Pakistan which were banned in that country by pro-US dictators, followed by a history of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty in India, the collapse of the Soviet Union, etc. When Khomeini's fatwa sentenced the writer Salman Rushdie to death, I wrote my first play together with Howard Brenton. This was "Iranian Nights," staged at the Royal Court and played to packed houses. It's the only play of mine the critics liked. The others challenged the eternal verities of the West, and the critics hated them. You can attack Khomeini but not the political shysters who rule the West.

In 1990 I began to write fiction. There were two concurrent projects. The first was my "Fall-of-Communism" trilogy. "Redemption" was a satirical novel which lampooned the sectarianism of the Trotskyist far-left and suggested that many of them would end up entering the three big religions. Instead, some of them became neo-cons in alliance with Christian fundamentalists, of which Hitchens is only the latest. The second was "Fear of Mirrors," a serious book which portrays the idealism of those who became communists at the turn of the last century.

The second project is the Islam Quintet, encouraged by the late Edward Said. Three novels are out and translated in most of the major languages, barring Chinese.

My fiction projects were interrupted by 9/11. Then I sat down and wrote "Clash of Fundamentalisms," and as Bush prepared to invade Iraq I decided to write "Bush in Babylon." But unless the great thinker-President invades another country I will try and write another novel over the next year.

G.P.: A number of prominent left-of-our-center American political commentators have recently published enormously popular books lambasting Bush, especially over his Iraq deceptions. As a Pakistani exile and long-time British activist and writer, how might your view of Bush and of the impacts of American Empire differ?

T.A.: Bush and the neocons are an easy target and clearly deserve the opprobrium, but the American Empire didn't start with them, and won't end with them, either. The turn towards military intervention started under Clinton. The notion that Wesley Clark would have fought a better war and won more allies is interesting, but debased. The mood of liberal America today is "anyone but Bush." I understand that and there's no doubt that a defeat for Bush would be seen as a defeat for his policies at home and abroad. Fine. Good. But what next? Is American politics destined to repeat itself endlessly, alternating between hard cop and soft cop? One yearns for a strong third party which can become the voice of the economically and politically dispossessed.

G.P.: In the US, the most commonly cited alternative by opponents to Iraq's occupation is some sort of administrative role for the UN. Can the UN, even after its defiance of Bush's unilateral invasion plans, ever act independently enough of US interests to be a true alternative? Is the UN any more credible within Iraq than Washington is?

T.A.: We've been here before. The British supposedly governed Iraq for ten years under a League of Nations "mandate." It didn't work. The British succeeded in creating an oligarch of racketeers to run the country. All one can say is that they were Iraqi racketeers. Today the US occupation is creating an oligarchy of neo-con supported US racketeers.

Putting all this under a UN umbrella will not change anything. Within Iraq the UN is hated as the administrator of the killer sanctions defended by Clinton and Albright and for legalizing the weekly Anglo-American bombing raids on Iraq for twelve years prior to the Occupation. The UN is today little more than an instrument of the US. The Secretary-General has as much real power as a waiter in the White House.

In my opinion its structures need to be completely overhauled and the large countries--South Africa, Brazil, India, Indonesia--should withdraw from this body unless the Security Council is made more representative and the General Assembly is given more powers.

My own feeling is that the only way the Iraqis will be able to get rid of the military occupation and the economic colonization is through a combination of political struggles and armed resistance. The fact that the US is privatizing health and education and everything else is uniting Iraqis of most stripes against the occupation. One just has to listen to the stories told by US soldiers returning home on furlough to understand that clearly. According to reports, some 5,000 soldiers have been sent home because of mental problems. They're suffering breakdowns because they know their presence is hated and they're forced to carry out harsh measures against Iraqis. All one can say is that it's sad the soldiers are suffering. It's the lying politicians in Washington and London who should be having breakdowns. Perhaps the US and British electorates might help out in this regard.

G.P.: When the bombing of the UN compound took place, I was a guest on a joint radio interview with a Democratic anti-war Congressman and with Joe Conason, a fairly well-known liberal Salon.com pundit. The US media spin was how Iraqi resistance had bombed an aid agency, meaning the UN; I pointed out the sanctions, bombings, and so on as reasons why, far from being a beloved aid agency, many Iraqis loathed the UN. Conason and the Democrat both dismissed that comment as, more or less, insane: look at all the good things the UN was doing! As though what happened last decade, or last week, didn't and wouldn't matter.

T.A.: How can these people be so ignorant? After all, what the UN did to Iraq on behalf of the US was hardly a secret. Two senior UN officials in Iraq, Dennis Halliday and Hans Van Sponeck, his successor, resigned in disgust at what the UN had done to Iraqi people. Simply because the neo-con and Christian right attack the UN does not mean that liberals and progressives have to turn a blind eye.

G.P.: In a past interview, you've characterized terrorism as "a sign of despair." What is state terrorism a sign of?

T.A.: Imperial power, in the case of the United States, designed to show the world who's the master, just like they did when they nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki In 1945. It had little to do with defeating Japan, but was designed to scare off the commies in China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Soviet Union.

Colonial power, in the case of Israel, which subjugates Palestine far more viciously than the British ever did. The daily humiliations heaped on the Palestinians are, in fact, reminiscent of what the Jews suffered in Germany prior to the Judeocide.

G.P.: Are there similarities between the fate of post-Taliban Afghanistan and what is now happening in Iraq?

T.A.: It's a very different situation. Iraq is under a total colonial occupation. In Afghanistan the writ of the West does not extend beyond Kabul and Kandahar, and even there not after sunset. In fact, the Northern Alliance controls most of the country. That's why the puppet Khalilzad-Karzai administration has opened up talks with a faction of the Taliban. They are desperate for allies. As for those deluded fools who saw the occupation of Kabul as a war for women's liberation, I suggest they pay the country a visit.

G.P.: Talk about the relationship, if any, between Iraqi defiance of its occupation and recent economic setbacks for Washington in WTO and FTAA deliberations. Are the neoliberal agenda and Bush's military unilateralism linked, and if so, how?

T.A.: The Washington Consensus walks on two legs: one economic, one military. They invade and occupy and make the countries safe for market fundamentalism. First Yugoslavia, now Iraq. How long will this work? The whole of Latin America is in rebellion against the neo-liberal new order. In every country there is a movement that challenges the IMF and the World Bank. They've wrecked Latin America. They've wrecked Africa. They now want to wreck the Arab East, but they should be warned. It won't work.

G.P.: For many years, socialism, and particularly the Soviet Union, served as the major visible global alternative to, and therefore check on the power of, the United States. For the global South and in places like Iraq, what, today, is the alternative?

T.A.: The only alternative is for people to take control of their own destiny and produce political leaders who speak for them and are not permanently on their knees before Washington. Free health, free education, subsidized housing, redistributive taxes...these used to be modest demands. Today they require insurrections in order to be implemented. That's how much the world has regressed since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It's not that the Soviet Union in itself was offering an image of the future. But its presence compelled capital to make concessions. Now it sees no need to do so and can revert to being the steamroller it was prior to 1917. Then different capitals fought wars to assert the hegemony of one over the others. Today the American Empire is so dominant that its rivals can groan and grumble but do nothing. Look at how the French, Germans, Chinese, and Russians voted to provide retrospective sanction to the US occupation of Iraq. Shameful. It's the Iraqi resistance that has exposed the vulnerability of the United States.

G.P.: After all these years, what gives you hope?

T.A.: After ten years of a deep political depression, there came Seattle. The fact that the corporations were being challenged in their own heartland came as a wake-up call to the rest of the world. The movements for global justice multiplied rapidly, and the World Social Forum was born. A tremendous start.

Then the opposition to the war in Iraq educated people on militarism and Empire, not the nebulous entity discussed by post-modernists embedded in Cultural Studies departments in the academy, but the real Empire, the United States.

There are today 190 member states of the UN. In 121 of these there is a US military presence. This necessitates a campaign that demands a withdrawal of these bases to facilitate a genuine democracy. Capitalism plus NGOs do not equal democracy. In "Clash of Fundamentalisms" I called for the example of Mark Twain to be repeated and for a new Anti-Imperialist League to be created in the US just as it was by Twain and progressive intellectuals a hundred years ago after the US occupied the Philippines. Gore Vidal should be invited to write a draft manifesto; Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Barbara Kingsolver, Susan Sontag and numerous others should be invited to become co-signatories, and then we could argue as to which US city should be privileged with the Founding Convention. It must be the broadest possible alliance. Not even a tiny whiff of sectarianism.