"I believe that the American administration of Iraq has been arrogant, has pursued policies that are illegal in international law and has been ignorant and incompetent. I said this very forthrightly to the senators."

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

"For instance, I was a little surprised that the Shiites didn't rise up against Saddam and the Baath party across most of the country when the Americans moved in March and April of 2003."

"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."

"Administering another country is always a very tricky proposition."

"I think that there's been an unfortunate tendency for right wing think tanks to dominate these discussions. They often produce very shoddy studies and policy recommendations, which are nevertheless taken very seriously."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I speak Urdu quite a lot, too, and I read a lot of Persian."

"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."

"Partisan politics has no place in the classroom."

"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."

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

"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."