Juan Cole Quotes

21 quotes in 400 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• I think it's really unfortunate that academics have been sidelined in most important policy debates.
• It's not proper for a professor to go before a class and promote one party or another. That's not academic scholarship.
• 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 lived in the Muslim world for 10 years.
• 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…
• 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…
• I speak Urdu quite a lot, too, and I read a lot of Persian.
• 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…

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