It's not proper for a professor to go before a class and promote one party or another. That's not academic scholarship.

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.

Administering another country is always a very tricky proposition.

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.

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.