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.

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

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.

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.

I lived in the Muslim world for 10 years.

Partisan politics has no place in the classroom.

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 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.

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

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.

Administering another country is always a very tricky proposition.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It's kind of scary sometimes, I've seen this a lot in Asia. Children are given music lessons, very intensively I might add and involving great technical expertise sometimes, but you can tell that they have been told only to play happy pleasant music.

I offer my expertise and experience for hire in order to help a group of people reach the summit.

You must continue to gain expertise, but avoid thinking like an expert.

My expertise was in public finance, particularly corporate taxation, since I had worked at the US Treasury.

As a medical doctor, it is my duty to evaluate the situation with as much data as I can gather and as much expertise as I have and as much experience as I have to determine whether or not the wish of the patient is medically justified.

Our hearts and prayers go out to the people in London and in Egypt. We're very concerned about it. We are providing our expertise to aid in the investigation in London.

Convinced that behavior and conduct are every bit as important as skills and expertise, I sought to build the firm into an enduring, values-based institution.

We've broken the code base into logical chunks, called modules, and the foundation staff delegate authority for the modules to people with the most expertise.

Despite a decade of criticism and budget cuts, the specialised UN agencies have far more expertise and hands-on experience than any other organisations in the world.

That's what amateur skating is about, technical expertise, and it should always stay that way.

I'm at a little loss in terms of my Leave It To Beaver expertise, since I never watched an episode of the show - so the cast in the pilot could have been Martians or they could have been the regular cast for all I know.

I have expertise in five different fields which helps me to easily understand the analogy between my scientific problems and those occurring in nature.

Never become so much of an expert that you stop gaining expertise. View life as a continuous learning experience.

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.

Very narrow areas of expertise can be very productive. Develop your own profile. Develop your own niche.

Right, but there's expertise and then there's inside information. And I think we have to make a distinction.

The bottom line to this is, there are few doctors who have any expertise in chemical exposure.

On the other hand, there would be some value in different folks getting together to share expertise and technology; but to the listener, it wouldn't necessarily seem like a single station in the traditional sense.

At the beginning, Lincoln was so inexperienced he had reverence for military expertise, not realizing that there wasn't any military expertise, that the most anybody had commanded up to that point had been somebody, some troops in the Mexican War, and it had been years ago.

Every day, we get a little bit closer to the kind of expertise and the kind of experience we're going to need to go there. I'd love to be the guy walking on Mars.

The same expertise we learned at the autopsy table can be applied to living people who've been shot, battered, or raped. The search for trace evidence is the same.

The nation will benefit in the long term if it continues to be open to foreign expertise. This will help the country to establish its business culture and environment faster, based on international best practice.

The trouble is that after nine years as a Jack of all trades and Master of the Dominican Order, I have no expertise on anything except airports and exotic foods.

If you look at the 19 hijackers who came to the United States in Sept. 11 to commit those acts, if you'd looked at them before they got onto a plane, you could probably say the same thing. There were various levels of expertise, various levels of competence.

You must write to the people's expertise.

Unless you have a perception of who you are as a lawyer, you will never be at ease in dealing with legal matters, clients, or courts. But if you know who you are and why you're there, all you need is the expertise and the information.

Bush the father did well in placing his sons as governors and did not forget to pass on the expertise in fraud from the leaders of the region to Florida to use it in critical moments.

My job is to suggest and ratify and use any expertise that I might have gained over the 23 years in professional hockey to make our game a better game.

People who have expertise or the luck to have rehearsal time with cameras have it over people who don't.

You basically have a group of four spies who are chosen for a mission they feel for the fact of how competent they are and how their expertise and they're the right one for the job. But ultimately they find out they've been actually chosen for their incompetence.