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.
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 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 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.
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 don’t accept the argument of people like David Horowitz that the government should impose some sort of predetermined political balance on academic research.
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.
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 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.