Juan Cole Quotes (33 Quotes)

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 just cannot understand this sort of argument.

Unlike a lot of American specialists in the Middle East, who did one Fulbright year and now find their language is rusty, I kept up my Arabic.

Americans have been given the message to respond this way by the American political elite, mass media and by select special interests.

Administering another country is always a very tricky proposition.

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.

As we speak, before the third anniversary of the war, the U. S. military does not control the capital, it faces a guerilla movement in Sunni Arab areas that is stronger than ever before. It faces a country that came very recently to the brink of an all-out civil war -- about which the U. S. military could do nothing. It is a bleak picture.

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.

This could be a tipping point. At some point, the Shiite street is going to be so fed up that they're not going to listen any more to calls for restraint.

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.

I don't think there are many allies in NATO who are going to be eager to send lots of troops to Iraq after seeing what happened to American troops.

They began to see some advantages to federalism - one of them being that the parties would control the resources.

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.

My gut tells me the letter is a forgery.

I also warned that it was entirely possible that Shiite Iraqis would become mobilized and approach fellow Shiite Ayatollahs in Iran.

But September 11 marked a big change in the sense that the public was suddenly interested, and as a professor at a public university I felt a responsibility to respond to all of the inquiries about the Islamic world.

I just don't understand under what circumstances other nations will be willing to be drawn into what looks increasingly like a major quagmire.

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.

I lived in the Muslim world for 10 years.

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.

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.

So when it says you are not to worship graven idols, that's what scholars call iconoclastic -- it's against images. The fear was, both in Judaism and Islam, that if you represented a holy figure like a prophet who had discussions with the divine, there would be a danger of people worshipping the image.

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.

'The size of the sea' But others say the debate is important because it can determine whether actions are taken that help stem the violence - or make matters worse. The question is how you reduce the number of bases the terrorists have and the size of the sea in which they swim, ... What something like the Iraq war does is increase the number of bases you have to deal with and the sea they have to swim in.

A U.S. withdrawal would not cause the Sunnis suddenly to want to give up their major demands indeed, they might well be emboldened to hit the Shiites harder.

... will play the role of rejection in the new Iraq. They are going to demand that all the controversial points in the constitution be addressed right away.

This vote is sort of a national vote of confidence for that leadership.

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.

Partisan politics has no place in the classroom.

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.

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

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