I think it's really unfortunate that academics have been sidelined in most important policy debates.
It's not proper for a professor to go before a class and promote one party or another. That's not academic scholarship.
I don't accept the argument of people like David Horowitz that the government should impose some sort of predetermined political balance on academic research.
My main expertise is in the past but if I have to extrapolate into the future I would say: no good news any time soon and an obvious exit strategy is not apparent to me.
I argued that the Bush administration and the Coalition officials more recently didn't understand Iraqi society. They thought it was a blank slate that they could use Iraqis as guinea pigs.
Public interest in most of the Middle East was slight at that time; the Arab-Israeli conflict was all that people were interested in and that was not my specialty.
I also argued before the war that the administration was underestimating Arab nationalism and Iraqi nationalism that it was not going to be as easy to rule Iraq as they thought.
An occupying power has no right to make significant alterations in the character of the occupied society to change the laws all around without a strong security reason and so forth.
Take the decision in early March to arrest Muqtada al-Sadr. It was made apparently without knowledge or understanding of the nature of his movement or how widespread it is.
Partisan politics has no place in the classroom.
If you put your politicians up for sale as the US does (alone in this among industrialized democracies) then someone will buy them--and it won't be you; you can't afford them.
I lived in the Muslim world for 10 years.
Administering another country is always a very tricky proposition.
I speak Urdu quite a lot too and I read a lot of Persian.