Juan Cole

David Langness Reports on New Orleans My dear friend David Langness, who has long experience in the field of humanitarian relief work, reports: ‘Howdy, folks, Back from a difficult, gruesome and yet exhilarating week in New Orleans, so here’s the report: Of all the disasters I’ve delivered medical relief to, Katrina is easily the most […]

Black Wednesday’s Death Toll rises to 150 The death toll in Wednesday’s eight bombings in Baghdad rose to 150, with one bomb in Kadhimiyah accounting for about 114. I can only imagine that hundreds were wounded. It is the second biggest one-day toll in guerrilla violence since the fall of Saddam (only March 2, 2004, […]

At least 90 Dead, 162 Injured in Baghdad Blast Sunnis Reject Constitution At 7 am on Wednesday morning, guerrillas detonated a huge suicide car bomb in the midst of Shiite day laborers gathering in search of work in the district of Kadhimiyah. It killed at least 90 and wounded 162, according to Al-Jazeera on Wednesday […]

Guest Editorial: Myerson on Iraqi Constitution “Federalism and the Iraqi Constitution” by Roger B. Myerson The draft Iraqi constitution deserves much more public discussion in America as well as in Iraq. As an economist who analyzes democratic constitutional structures, I’d like to offer a few comments. In most of the text, the constitution seems to […]

Tal Afar as Ethnic Civil War Much of the American press has reported the Tal Afar campaign as a strike by the new Iraqi Army, supported by US troops, against foreign infiltrators in the largely Turkmen city of 200,000. As Jonathan Finer makes clear in the Washington Post, however, the operation looks different if we […]

No Comments: Raed In a sad sign of the times, Raed Jarrar and friends, the Iraqi bloggers, have closed their comment section. They were alarmed by the recent launching of a lawsuit against a site for reader comments at the web page. They were also alarmed by a more draconian form of the phenomenon. What, […]

No Constitution Yet Waters of Battle recede in Tal Afar The final text of the Iraqi constitution has still not been worked out, and so the United Nations cannot begin to print it in several million copies so that Iraqi voters can read it before the October 15 referendum. It is going to be very […]

9/11, 7/7 and 8/30 On the fourth-year anniversary of the al-Qaeda attacks on the US, it is important that we take stock of where we stand. We do not stand in a good place. The US military is bogged down in an intractable guerrilla war in Iraq, which most Muslims view as an aggressive neo-imperialism. […]

Tal Afar Stormed Threat of Ethnic Cleansing Grows in Iraq Iraqi troops took the lead in the ground assault in the northern Turkmen city of Tal Afar, in an attempt by the US to showcase newly trained Iraqi army units. The problem is that they are perceived as mostly Shiite, and the Tal Afar campaign […]