This article is based on Norman Mailer's Commonwealth Club speech in San Francisco on February 20, 2003. Mr. Mailer received the Club's Centennial Medallion, in honor of the organization's hundredth anniversary. An audio stream of the speech can be heard on commonwealthclub.org.

Only in America
by Norman Mailer
March 7, 2003

"It is probably true that at the beginning of the present push of the administration to go to war, the connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were minimal"

Each, on the face of it, had to distrust the other. From Saddam's point of view, bin Laden was the most troublesome kind of man, a religious zealot, that is to say a loose cannon, a warrior who could not be controlled. To bin Laden, Saddam was an irreligious brute, an unbalanced fool whose boldest ventures invariably crashed.

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