Juan Cole

Competent Intelligence Urged by Rumsfeld Ironies of Iraq today: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is afraid that the new Shiite religious government in Iraq will purge ex-Baathists placed in the army and intelligence services by US ally Iyad Allawi, a long-term CIA asset. Rumsfeld said that competent persons should be retained. This is the same […]

Sharon Defies Bush The AP headline gets it right: Sharon dismisses Bush Warning on Settlement Expansion. I would have called it “large-scale land theft” rather than “settlement expansion,” but it comes to the same thing. Wait a second. Isn’t that Ariel Sharon, whose government gets billions of dollars a year from the United States (who […]

What the Muslims think is Really Happening in Jerusalem The far-right Israeli extremists who demonstrated in Jerusalem were not just protesting the plan to remove Israeli colonists from Gaza, as was reported in the Western press. Rather, they were threatening to invade the al-Aqsa Mosque. The Muslim world understood this threat as an intention to […]

Life Imprisonment for Saddam? Are the guerrillas fighting in Iraq demanding that Saddam not be executed as one of their conditions for coming in from the cold? Adrian Blomfield reports from Baghdad that leaders of the Fidayi Saddam and Jaish Muhammad (Sunnis, including some former military officers who adopted political Islam) have been in back-channel […]

US Millions in Iraq Wasted I saw Lewis Black, the comedian, in Detroit last month. Lewis does angry humor. But at one point he went on a rant about how you just had to look around Detroit to see how the Congress was allowing our cities to deteriorate, and he flew into a genuine rage. […]

Allawi resigns, Joins New Government Iyad Allawi has consented to join the new Iraqi government. He is demanding 4 of 31 cabinet posts for his Iraqiya Party, which only has 40 seats in the 275-member parliament, including at least one important cabinet post. Allawi has now submitted his resignation as prime minister and is dissolving […]

Of Bents and Teaching Daniel Drezner maintains that there are virtually no political science courses that deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict in the United States that have a “Zionist bent.” Well, I disagree, and I have lots of evidence for disagreeing. But anyway, Drezner has misunderstood my point. I don’t give a rat’s ass whether […]

Up to 300,000 Demonstrate in Baghdad Edmund Sanders reports that the crowds in downtown Baghdad protesting the US troop presence in the country may have been as large as 300,000. If it were even half that, these would be the largest popular demonstrations in Iraq since 1958! To any extent that they show popular sentiment […]

Friedman’s Slander of Middle East Studies and How it is Wrong and Ignorant On April 7, 2005, in his New York Times op-ed piece, Thomas Friedman wrote: ‘ Until the recent elections in Iraq and among the Palestinians, the modern Arab world was largely immune to the winds of democracy that have blown everywhere else […]