37 Quotes by Juan Cole

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 be you; you can’t afford them.

My gut tells me the letter is a forgery.

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.

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.

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

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

Perhaps that's why he was given such a good reception.

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.

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.