Juan Cole

17 Killed, Mostly Policemen Sabrina Tavernisse of the New York Times managed to get the figures from the Iraqi Health Ministry on how many Iraqis are dying each month in violence related to the civil war. They estimate about 8,000 in the past 10 months, or 800 per month. This number appears not to include […]

Shiite Children Targeted Najaf Clerics Warn of Civil War Borzou Daragahi of the Los Angeles Times reports on the gruesome bombing in the poor Shiite “New Baghdad” district on Wednesday. US troops in the neighborhood attracted the interest of children. At first the soldiers tried to wave them away, but then gave in and handed […]

New Leads in London Bombing British police suspect that the four British/South Asian young men who carried out the London Underground bombings had mentors who came to the country from abroad, recruited them, trained them in bomb making, and then slipped out of the UK shortly before the operation. The main mentor appears to have […]

Breaks in the London Bomb Case British police on Tuesday began revealing the contours of their investigation of the London Underground bombings of July 7. The details were heart-wrenching. It appears that the foot soldiers for the operation, at least, were 4 British citizens of South Asian Muslim heritage from the city of Leeds, aged […]

Talk of Foreign Troop Withdrawals as Bombs strike Kirkuk, Tal Afar Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari said on Tuesday that some Iraqi cities were secure enough so that US and Coalition troops could withdraw from them soon. He defended, however, a US military presence in the short term, and opposed a precise timetable for US withdrawal. […]

Daily Kos Must Diaries Daily Kos’s Mike Pridmore has started an informed and enlightening discussion of Kramer’s attack on Middle East Studies professors in the US. See also Susan Hu’s diary on the indications that some military bases may be blocking Informed Comment and presumably other similar sources of information on Iraq. I have a […]

Rove Unfit for Public Office Whether the courts can and will punish Karl Rove for telling Time Magazine’s Matthew Cooper that Joe Wilson’s wife was a CIA operative should be beside the point. That’s for the courts to decide. The real question is whether we want a person to occupy a high office in the […]

35 Killed in Clashes, Guerrilla Attacks on Monday Al-Zaman reports that 2 members of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a leading Shiite political party, were killed in Latifiyah. The circumstances were not reported, but that area of Iraq has seen repeated Sunni-Shiite violence. Reuters reports security incidents in Iraq for Monday: In […]

London, Terrorism and Iraq A Majority of Americans says Iraq War has made them Less Safe The UK will have two minutes of silence on Thursday in honor of the victims of the the July 7 bombings. We should have it in the United States, as well. If we cannot synchonize with the British timing […]