Juan Cole

Dabbous Guest Editorial: Getting Home in Beirut My View from our Sunni-Beiruti Neighbourhood Eugène Richard Sensenig-Dabbous ‘For those of you who know Beirut, I drove from my office at the Maronite Catholic Notre Dame University Zouk Mosbeh up the hill from Jounieh) Thursday, via Sassine Square to Sodeco/Damascus Street at the north-western edge of predominantly […]

Gul: A Partitioned Iraq Means “Endless War” Bombings, Killings in Baghdad Leave 50 Dead Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul is warning the US not to just leave Iraq in chaos, allowing a civil war that leads to partitioning the country– a situation that he says will lead to “endless war.” Gul is right about all […]

Karrada Bombing kills 26, 40 Bodies Found Maliki Threatens Sunni MP Reuters reports on political violence in Iraq’s ongoing civil war. In Baghdad: *Police found 40 bodies on Thursday, most of them showing signs of torture. *Guerrillas set off a car bomb in a shopping district of the Karrada neighborhood of downtown Baghdad, killing 26 […]

Battle at Haifa Street kills 30 Senate Foreign Relations Committee rejects Escalation The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 12 to 9 for a non-binding resolution condemning the Bush administration’s escalation of the war. All but one of the 10 Republicans on the committee voted against it. The dissenter was Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. US […]

Iraqi Television on Bush’s State of the Union It is odd that US media seem completely uninterested in how Bush’s State of the Union speech was received in Iraq, where half of it would be implemented. The Open Source Center of the US Government did a report on this issue, below. Note that former Iraqi […]

Another Helicopter Downed, 5 Americans Dead Mahdi Army Pledges not to Respond to US Arrests Sunni Arab guerrillas used some sort of surface to air rocket or missile a heavy PKC machine gun of a sort the US has trained the Iraqi Army in to shoot down a Blackwater helicopter guarding a high-level US ground […]

Arguing With Bush Yet one question has surely been settled – that to win the war on terror we must take the fight to the enemy. Actually, it is unclear what “taking the fight to the enemy” means in Bush’s ill-conceived “war on terror.” He is probably still trying to sneak Iraq into the struggle […]

Ashura Massacres Shake Iraq At Least 130 Killed The Western press reported on 130 of the iraqis killed in political violence in Iraq on Monday, and the some 200 wounded. It isn’t ordinary time in Iraq for the Shiites, it is ritual time, sacred time. It is a time of deep mourning, of grief and […]

Rightwing Smearers of Obama Don’t know a School from a Madrasa The rightwing smear campaign against Barack Obama, waged by a magazine funded by the far rightwing Korean businessman and part-time messiah, the Reverend Moon, has foundered on CNN’s good reporting. The allegation was that he had gone to a radical “Saudi-funded” madrasah. Wolf Blitzer […]