"He continues to work on weapons of mass destruction. If you listen to his former bomb-maker, Khidir Hamza, it’s maybe a couple of years before he has a nuclear weapon and Saddam with a nuclear weapon changes the whole face of the Middle East."

I put it to Woolsey that the opponents of military action against Iraq look with scepticism upon projections of an Iraqi nuclear capacity in one, two or three years. The opponents argue that projections of this kind have been in vogue for years, that in reality no-one quite knows if and when Saddam will possess a nuclear capability; and that all such speculations are simply a risk-free form of pressure exerted on those who would chart a more prudent course. Woolsey rejects this line of thinking out of hand.

"They’re ostriches putting their heads into the sand. We know he has the infrastructure and knows how to make a nuclear weapon and has the experts and equipment - it’s not all that difficult to do. The South Africans did it with a relatively modest investment. It’s a question of getting the fissionable material. The enrichment facilities are distributed around the country. It’s a question of how quickly he can do it, or buy some on the black market. The State Department can’t tell you that it’s going to be impossible for him to get a few pounds of fissionable material from Russian organised crime. I think anybody who says that they know it’s not going to happen within two or three or four years is being very irresponsible - and I’m not surprised they won’t speak for the record and put their names behind what they say when they say things like that."

Woolsey believes the opponents of military intervention have an inverted standard for evidence. Rather than regarding Saddam’s nuclear capacity as a fearful eventuality whose disproof should require conclusive evidence, they insist instead that those who assert its likelihood should produce water-tight proof. Woolsey ticks off one damning fact after another to indicate that the balance of evidence is weighted very heavily against the opponents.

"It would be different if Saddam were doing a lot of good things in the world and then had this one little glitch - that he was working on a nuclear weapon. It’s not the case. He’s a torturer, he’s a killer, he’s an oppressor of the Iraqi people, he’s a sponsor of terrorism of various kinds. He tried to kill former President Bush in 1993. I think there’s some evidence — not conclusive — that his intelligence services have been involved with the events of 9/11. Certainly, Al-Hani, his intelligence officer, met on at least one occasion with Mohamed Atta, the lead bomber for 9/11, in Prague. I think that it’s clear he’s training terrorists at Salman Pak on how to hijack aircraft — including non-Iraqi terrorists — on how to hijack aircraft with knives. There are at last two former American weapons inspectors for the UN and three Iraqi defectors that have reported on different aspects of that training."

With barely concealed sarcasm, Woolsey observes, "I don’t know what the people in the State Department would say. Perhaps they say it’s not conclusively proven that he is not doing this just to go after Icelandic Air. But another explanation does seem to suggest itself."

"The first Bush Administration handled a lot of aspects of foreign policy very well. They managed well the end of the Cold War. I think they managed the relationship with Russia and the Soviet Union; they managed integrating Germany into NATO and unifying it. They did a lot of that well, but this was a terrible decision in 1991." Quizzed on the reasons for that historic mistake, Woolsey answers with a Shakespearean turn, "I think it was a question of believing it was better to bear those ills you have than fly to others you know not of. Better the devil you know, I think. They were too worried about instability [in Iraq] when they should have been worried about what was going to happen if they got the reputation of being weak and leaving Saddam in place."

Indeed, the US has had its difficulties persuading its Gulf allies to come on board. Those fated to live next to Saddam have proved unwilling supporters of policies that chastise and inhibit Saddam, but fail to destroy him. "The first Bush Administration," continues Woolsey, "made one bad decision on that issue and the Clinton Administration made eight years of bad decisions on that issue. So you simply can’t blame, from the point of view of understanding, those in the Mid-East who say that we have backed down in the face of Iraqi intransigence and we don’t have the will to deal with Saddam. That’s been true for a decade until, I hope, now."

Has the war on terrorism changed US resolve on Iraq? For the moment, with the Afghan campaign winding down, the public emphasis is on the Indian subcontinent, Somalia and the southern Philippines.

"I don’t know," replies Woolsey with that sense of resignation that comes upon people who were once at the centre of decision-making, "I hope so. I believe it’s important to go in and help the Philippines and to get rid of the al-Qaeda cells in Somalia. But those are not an alternative to dealing with the leading terrorist state in the Mid-East. Now Iran is up there as a close rival to Iraq, but Iran is a state in ferment, with a real parliament, a real president and protesting students. A lot of the Shi’i ulema in Qoms and elsewhere in Iran are being very hostile to Khamenei and the hardline mullahs. But Iraq will never see a change that is generated internally. This is a total, Nazi-like dictatorship and the only way it’s going to be got rid off is if we kill the leaders of the Ba’ath regime."

The US had for some time the option of encouraging an internal coup, which was pursued unsuccessfully, or alternatively backing Iraqi opposition forces. The latter has been tried only with tepidity and ambivalence. Why? "I don’t know, I think that’s stupid. Certainly [the opposition] would amount to a lot more if it would get money freed up from the State Department that the Congress appropriated now four years ago. I think the State Department is dragging its feet; the CIA is dragging its feet."

"But surely the President could get the State Department to unfreeze the funds?"

"Well, I’m not sure God himself can affect the State Department bureaucracy in the United States. Perhaps some of these things will change as time goes on."

"It’s not just a question of the Iraqi opposition, although they’re an important part of it. It’s stockpiling adequate numbers of smart weapons. It’s talking to Turkey and getting their support for military action, for we should not be in the business of having a coup. We don’t want to just get rid of Saddam and have another regime like his. We need to bring democracy. I think that’s the only thing that would substantially change the face of the Middle East."

But successful democracy has been brought to no state in the Arab Middle East in 50 years. However, Woolsey sees the defeatism inherent in that statement as a self-fulfilling prescription for further failure, and he is quick to point out the example of other societies that were once deemed unlikely candidates for democracy.

"In 1945 in the United States, when the government was focused upon the Morgenthau Plan, people said that about Germany. And when Macarthur helped get the Japanese constitution drafted right after the war, they said he was being naïve and ridiculous — the Japanese would never accept democracy. They said the same thing about the Koreans; they said the same thing about the Chinese, until Taiwan became a democracy…Certainly people said that about Russia and even Russia is now a somewhat troubled democracy."

"I think the main problem is that we have been insufficiently supportive of democracy. We have tried to manage relations with autocrats, taking a leaf from the French and British book circa the early 1920s, and for 75 years we’ve just looked out for our oil interests and done a bit of foreign aid and tried to get along with the somewhat milder-mannered autocrats rather than the worse ones. And we’ve ended up with September 11 and a Mid-East, outside Israel and Turkey, that is largely populated by governments that are either vulnerable autocracies or pathological predators. We need a sea change. We need to destroy the pathological predators and tell the autocrats — whether they are Saudi princes or Alawites in Syria, or wherever — that this country is on the march again and we are on the side of things that they most fear, namely, their own people. I think we need to get back to some of the things we’ve done well in the past, which is bringing democracy to parts of the world that haven’t enjoyed it before and I think we have to take off the gloves to do it."

The crucial question remains, however — can America wear the pressures and tensions such a policy change would produce? Woolsey has no doubt it can. "Well, first of all, we’re popular in the streets of the two countries where we’re opposed to the autocracies - Iran and Iraq. It can’t be shown in Iraq, but I think it’s there. In Iran, it’s being shown everyday by the way the students are acting. We need to give the populations of some other Mid-East states reasons to think we’re on their side instead of on the side of those who govern them autocratically. We left a wrong impression because of the decision that was taken in ’91 not to proceed against Saddam. We left the impression that we just came there to protect oil and we didn’t care about the people of Iraq. We need to change that impression by getting behind democracy in at least one major Mid-Eastern state; we can’t do everything at once, but Iraq would be a good place to start. If we democratised Iraq, it would be such a sea-change in the Middle East that the Alawites in Syria and a lot of people would start to get nervous and worried, and I want them to be nervous and worried."