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

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.

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

Did you know that they introduced the 15 percent flat tax on individual and corporate income in Iraq? Something that some politicians very much wanted to push in the United States without success but in Iraq they do it.

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.

I think it's really unfortunate that academics have been sidelined in most important policy debates.