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.

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

To the extent that the (ISIS's) advance is a series of urban revolts against the government of PM Nouri al-Maliki, the US would end up bombing ordinary city folk. For the US to be bombing Sunni towns all these years later on behalf of Mr. al-Maliki would be to invite terrorism against the US.

Mr. Bush, I don't recognize the world you paint. I find your speech a form of sheer propaganda, having almost no relationship to reality. ...You can't 'stay the course' because you don't have a course.

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

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.