Juan Cole

Breaking News: Tens of Thousands Protest Americans in Baghdad Tens of thousands of Shiites came out Saturday to Firdaws Square in downtown Baghdad to protest the continued US military presence in Iraq. It is the largest demonstration ever achieved by the Sadr Movement, who are Shiite nationalists. The crowds reenacted the pulling down of the […]

Protests Called for Saturday Against US Troop Presence Wire services and Arab News report: “In the main southern city of Basra, three masked men shot dead an officer in the new Iraqi Army as he was dining Thursday, an army spokesman said. The same night, four US soldiers were wounded in the northern town of […]

Jaafari Appointed Prime Minister Jalal Talabani appears to have had a senior moment of some magnitude. In the course of announcing that Ibrahim Jaafari will be Iraq’s new prime minister, he says he suffered a memory lapse and had to leave the podium so an aide could remind him of Jaafari’s name. The superstitious took […]

Mahdi Army still a Factor Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post continues his world-beating coverage of Iraq with an article on the reemergence of the Mahdi Army in the south, in places like Nasiriyah and Basrah. Look, if all the Mahdi Army amounts to is angry young men with guns persuaded to support puritanical morality […]

Cairo Blast at Khan al-Khalili The analysis of the bombing of a tourist area of Cairo, which killed 4 and wounded 18 on Thursday given by the Egyptian social scientists interviewed by China’s Xinhuanet seems to me quite sophisticated. They pointed to increased wealth stratification (social contradictions) in Egypt– where the poor have stayed poor […]

New York Times Supports McCarthyite Witch Hunt I am cancelling my subscription to the New York Times, and I urge others to do the same. The New York Times editorial board went over to the Dark Side on Thursday, with an editorial that blasted the end results of a panel at Columbia University that investigated […]

Bush Less Popular than Dick Nixon Could Iraq be the undoing of both major political parties that backed the war in the West? President Bush is suffering from the worst poll numbers of any second-term president in the spring after his reelection since World War II. If the rest of his second term goes like […]

Provincial Elections Stir Trouble My comments on the Lehrer News Hour about the implications of the formation of a presidency council are now online. I was challenged by Dr. Karim on some facts. But I stand by what I said. 1) Adnan al-Janabi was in fact rejected as speaker by the Shiites and Kurds because […]

Yalla Ya Jama’ah (Hurry up, folks!) The Department of Defense is having difficulty, according to Fred Kaplan at Slate, in coming up with a policy on teaching Arabic to Pentagon personnel. Not a program, not a class. A policy. The University of Michigan and other Title VI (federally-supported) centers, in contrast, are training thousands of […]