Juan Cole

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 […]

Hitchens and Iraq History News Network has reprinted my essay responding to Christopher Hitchens on the Iraq War.

Television Review: The Flight that Fought Back The Discovery Channel is airing a documentary on United Airlines flight 93, which was hijacked and crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11. It will be on 9 pm on Sunday, September 11, and then repeated at 11 pm and at 1 am. I watched it this morning and […]

Private Company Shuts down Baghdad International Airport More violence in Baghdad The steady drumbeat of mayhem continued again on Friday. One bomb in Baghdad killed 4 persons, including three policemen, and wounded 9. There were other assassinations and guerrilla violence elsewhere in the country. Al-Zaman: American forces, both infantry and armor moved further into the […]

Another Winning Formula for Iraq Distinguished Middle East historian William R. Polk writes: ‘ If my comments in my last essay on the suggestion of Scott Gerwehr and Nina Hachigian on how to turn around insurgents “with a little tenderness” depressed you, be of good cheer. All is not lost. I have just read about […]