Then we have countries which didn't even have the guts to take a position. The Pentagon list also rightly excludes those countries which found it suitable to stand by and watch and say nothing. Sweden, Ireland, Austria, and Finland, all neutral countries, are out. Good, good, good and good.

It shouldn't be too surprising, however, that Old Europe would declare their exclusion as unfair. Their world, like Leftist worlds everywhere, are unused to repercussions for moral failures. I must say, the United States has in part facilitated that mentality. For far too long we have made nice with Old Europe. I think it's due in part to our romantic nature, to say nothing of our personal ties with the Old World.

We are Americans first, but we love our ancestors and a world which has indeed helped to make the United States move from a dream to a reality. But sentiment should go only so far. My heritage is Italian and Irish. I've been proud that Italy stood by us, and ashamed that Ireland did not. I accept that.

This was the occasion when Saddam drove my colleague Tony Clifton into central Baghdad in his own Range Rover and challenged him to find a single man who opposed his rule. Needless to say, every quivering serf brought before my friend for interrogation offered to give both his blood and his soul for the father figure of the Baathist revolution standing beside him.

Don't aks me about no Andy Kaufman. I don't know nothing about Kaufman, except he's a dead guy tryin' to ride my coattails. He was ALWAYS trying to use my good name to get places!! Look where it got him now!

The offshoring business remains predominantly English-speaking. It is dominated by American and British companies outsourcing their internal operations to third parties in places such as Ireland, Canada and South Africa, but most of all in India. The fact that America and Britain have relatively liberal employment laws has also been influential in the shift of business overseas. If offshoring is, as McKinsey claims, a "win-win" formula for both sides, the process is set to give English-speaking countries a significant competitive advantage.

. . . And it also shows you sort of the dark side of women in power during that period. Women -- there's always a sort of surreptitious theory that women as voters, women as a political force are the good people. They want to take care of the babies and stuff, whereas the men want only to cut taxes or go to war or whatever.

. . . But when women began to get political power, the first thing they wanted to do was to enforce middle class Main Street female rules of behavior on the rest of the society. They ban liquor, ban any kind of sexual expression whatsoever, ban pornography, ban gambling, ban prostitution. Banned everything that is just, you know, a respectable matron in Main Street would not like.

There was -- and not -- and many people who read the book said, I didn't really like that chapter. Let's skip over the Temperance part and go on to the next neat thing that we did, you know. The Temperance thing shows that there is not -- women in politics have not been perfect.

LAMB: You do say in your book that Eleanor Roosevelt was the most important woman -- possibly the most important woman in American history.

COLLINS: I think so, you know. She was the first one, and she had a little bit of that same genius for that rope-a-dope liberation thing. What she did, she was able to do, she created so much of the New Deal, really the heart of the New Deal, the idea that government had an obligation to make sure people were taken care of and that they were OK in this country, that somehow the safety net existed and it was government's responsibility to do that.

LAMB: Let me ask you about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And you write about it -- it's written a lot. He's the guy that had the affair, though, with another woman that split that family up. Why would you want to give him so much credit for women getting advanced?

COLLINS: Well, you know, what we learned, and we -- actually, I wrote a book about this, the one before this, the . . .

LAMB: Scandal book?

COLLINS: "Scorpion Tongue." It was gossip, celebrity in American politics. What we learned again with Bill Clinton was that American women, like American men, do not care about what a president is doing in his bedroom if they're getting the stuff they want in terms of his policies.

LAMB: As the editor of the editorial page of "The New York Times," do you ever sit there in your office or do you think about, as in that position I have a responsibility to women to do the following?

COLLINS: No. I think I have a responsibility to women and to children. But -- yeah -- and you work -- you always feel that since you're there, you have to be particularly open to women's, you know, interests and needs and complaints, but I don't know that my predecessor, Hal Raines, was certainly, you know, committed to women's rights and to women's issues. And the other members of the board are, too. In the "New York Times," we've long passed the Henry Raymonds (ph). "The New York Times'" editorial board positions have been sort of massively committed to women's rights for a long time now.

LAMB: If five of the editorial positions on the board of the 14 are women, when are we going to see a majority?

COLLINS: You know, they don't turn over very fast. And whenever I hire somebody, I must admit that although I would love to have more women, you know, there's -- there's all these other things that come into the mix. And you're always trying to make the mix more fruitful. So sometimes all the different variables don't come up at the same time, but I get yelled at a lot by women about that. So I'm certainly very conscious of it.

LAMB: What was the date of your new title?

COLLINS: I came on in August of 2001. So I had about a month before -- you know, when I came on, I thought, Well, this is sort of strange, because I was a columnist. You don't normally make a columnist the editorial page editor. But I thought, Well, I'm very good at kind of spinning things and making things interesting, even if they're kind of pedestrian. So it's going to be a really boring time in American history! Things look so calm. The economy is great. Foreign affairs are very dull. So I'll just sort of spin stuff around and see what I can do with it.

LAMB: You went where to college?

COLLINS: I went to Marquette (ph), Milwaukee.

LAMB: Did you have any experience there that . . .

COLLINS: Well, you know, that was the period -- even Marquette, which was a very conservative school, you know, in the late '60s was a period in which you were supposed to not go to class very much! And we took to the streets, and we demonstrated for freedom of speech and stuff like that. So there was a lot of stuff that we got to do then that just happened because that's the way the world was at the time, you know?

. . . LAMB: After Marquette, what'd you do?

COLLINS: Well, I got married, and I went to graduate school at the University of Massachusetts. WE [sic] had more demonstrations!

(LAUGHTER)

COLLINS: Closed down more schools, had more days with no classes. And then my husband and I went to Connecticut. We both got journalism jobs there. My husband, Dan's, an editor at CBS. And then we went from Connecticut to New York, and here I am.

The gunfire grew louder, until clusters of bullets swarmed into the air amid grenade bursts. In the main street, cars crashed into each other in the chaos.

But this was momentary joy, not jubilation. There were no massive crowds on the boulevards of Baghdad, no street parties, no expressions of joy from the ordinary people of the capital city.

For Saddam has bequeathed to his country and to its would-be "liberators" something uniquely terrible: continued war. And there was one conclusion upon which every Iraqi I spoke to yesterday agreed.

This bedraggled, pathetic man with his matted, dirty hair, living in a hole in the ground with three guns and cash as his cave-companions - this man was not leading the Iraqi insurgency against the Americans. Indeed, more and more Iraqis were saying before Saddam's capture that the one reason they would not join the resistance to US occupation was the fear that - if the Americans withdrew - Saddam would return to power. Now that fear has been taken away. So the nightmare is over - and the nightmare is about to begin. For both the Iraqis and for us.

The British public would like to see Saddam Hussein tried in Iraq and sentenced to death, according to a poll released today. . . .

Today's ICM poll for the New Frontiers Foundation thinktank found 59% in favour of a trial in Iraq "with some international representation", against 29% who said Saddam should be dealt with by the UN.

Asked whether he should face capital punishment or imprisonment, those taking part in the poll preferred the death penalty by 50% to 38%.

The survey found 55% support for the military action in Iraq, against 30% who said they were opposed - a significant jump in backing for the war since November, when the figures were 47%-41% in favour.

Dominic Cummings, director of New Frontiers, said: "This poll shows the public support the British and American position that the trial should be conducted by the Iraqis with help from other countries - not the UN.

"Having failed to deal with Saddam properly, the UN should not be trusted with organising his trial.

"In dealing with similar problems in the future, we need to think about new global defence and trade alliances - not rely on the UN."