Juan Cole

Will Iran get the Bomb? It seems pretty obvious that Iran will get the nuclear bomb and there is not much anyone can do about it. I’m not saying it is a good thing. I’m just saying that I can’t imagine what would stop it. One thing that might have stopped it was direct military […]

Salon Article on Iraq Strife My article on the bombing campaign and increased ethnic strife in Iraq is at Melting pot of blood, is at Salon.com

Secret British Memo Shows Bush Tampered with Iraq Intelligence A top secret British memorandum dated 23 July 2002 was leaked in the run-up to yesterday’s parliamentary elections in the UK (which Blair won, though his Labour Party was much weakened by public disgust with such shenanigans as the below). I mirror the memo below, from […]

30 Killed in Bombings in Iraq, Dozens Wounded Ash-Sharq al-Awsat estimates the number of dead in Iraq from bombings and attacks in Iraq on Thursday at 30. AFP, apparently filing a bit earlier, put the toll at 26. A string of bombings targeted police and military targets in Baghdad. In the 5 days from 30 […]

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 […]