Juan Cole

Irbil toll Rises to 60 dead, 100 Wounded The death toll in Wednesday morning’s Irbil bombing has risen to 60, with 150 wounded, according to the New York Times. The Ansar al-Sunna, an offshoot of the old Ansar al-Islam terrorist group, claimed responsibility. But I am suspicious that all the major incidents in Iraq are […]

Sunni-Shiite Rioting at Baghdad University Sunni, Kurdish Recriminations on Cabinet A riot broke out at Baghdad University on Tuesday and continued Wednesday, pitting furious Shiite students against Sunni Arab students and professors, over the killing of a Shiite student. Al-Zaman reports that the Kurdistan Alliance in the Iraqi parliament is furious that a phrase was […]

Al-Libi Captured The capture of Abu Faraj al-Libi, a high al-Qaeda operative, in Pakistan is further proof that if you are interested in a “war” on terrorism, your best tools are counter-terrrorism and counter-insurgency agents. Al-Libi was captured through human intelligence, i.e., he was turned in by someone who knew who he was and where […]

Franklin Arrested Pentagon official Lawrence Franklin has been arrested and charged by the FBI with having shown classified documents to two officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Steven Rosen, AIPAC director of foreign policy issues, and Keith Weissman, high-level Middle East analyst–both of them only recently fired). Rosen is alleged once to have […]

Breaking News: 50 Dead in Irbil Bombing, 100 Wounded A man with high explosives on his person detonated his payload in the midst of a crowd of civilians lined up to apply for jobs as policemen in the northern, Kurdish city of Irbil. (Or it might have been a car bomb– reports are confused) Casualty […]

Sunni VP Boycotts Swearing-In Ceremony 8 US Troops Wounded at Qaim and Ramadi, Dozens of Iraqis Killed Iraq’s government was sworn in on Tuesday. But the key ministries of Defense (which will go to a Sunni Arab) and Petroleum (which will go to a Shiite) are still unfilled, as are several others promised to the […]

Is Bigotry All Right in Politics? John Aravosis argues that Pat Robertson should be a political pariah after his remarks on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that Muslim Americans are not fit to serve in the US cabinet. It is actually much worse than that. Robertson also implied that Jews are unfit to serve on […]

Madison and Algeria Many, many thanks to Armando and other diarists at Daily Kos for a thorough, impassioned and learned debate on my rant about the dangers of the Republican Senators ending the American republic in favor of a simple demagogic “democracy” like Algeria, 1991.

Boycott of Israeli Universities Wrong: AAUP The American Association of University Professors has quite rightly come out against a recent resolution of the British Association of University Teachers (one of two main such organizations in the UK) that an academic boycott should be imposed on the University of Haifa and Bar Ilan University. Long-time readers […]