Juan Cole

45 Dead in Continued Guerrilla War Baghdad Pitched Battle Kills 24 AFP reports that violence in Iraq on Sunday left 45 dead in separate incidents. The biggest incident involved an ambush about 15 miles from Baghdad. Details are sketchy, but it resulted in a firefight between US troops and local guerrillas, with 24 of the […]

Iraq and Vietnam Although Martin van Creveld in the Boston Review is pushing the analogy between Iraq and Vietnam (with Moshe Dayan in Saigon as an interesting plot device), in fact the conflict does not resemble Vietnam. In Communism, the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong had a universal ideology with a nationalist subtext that could […]

Iraq Two Years Later Tom Engelhardt pulls it all together in his essay on the state of affairs in American Iraq. It is a comprehensive and timely meditation, given that we have just passed the 2-year anniversary of the start of the US invasion. Engelhardt’s clear-eyed deconstruction of the boosterist myths of devotees of neo-Empire […]

Hariri and al-Qaeda? Really? I don’t have a dog in the fight about who killed Rafiq Hariri, but I don’t find the case for the Syrians being behind it is airtight. I worked for Monday Morning Co. in the late 1970s in Beirut as a journalist/translator and the Syrian secret police used sometimes to pull […]

Wave of Bombings in Middle East (Revised). The continued instability in the Middle East yielded on Saturday a harvest of deadly bombings in the region. Qatar was shaken Saturday by a bombing near a theater where British were playing Shakespeare. One British subject was killed, and several people were wounded. The bombing was done by […]

Jaafari: Iraq headed toward Religious Law On the second anniversary of the launching of the Iraq War, crowds demonstrated throughout the world. Among the larger rallies were those in London (45,000) and Istanbul (15,000). The crowds were smaller than those that demonstrated in late winter 2003 as the war was gearing up. Such relatively large […]

Two Car Bombings of US Troops Iraqi Politics Still Unsettled Wire service report that ‘ Insurgents attacked US troops with two suicide car bombs in the western Iraqi town of Haditha on Friday, local witnesses said. They said a suicide bomber detonated a car next to a US patrol after American troops entered the town […]

Wolfowitz’s Plot to Destroy OPEC And Why it was always Ridiculous Joe Conason presents some excellent reasons why Paul Wolfowitz should not head the World Bank. But there may be others. The BBC Newsnight reports the titanic struggle between the Neoconservatives and Big Oil over Iraqi petroleum. If this story is true, it is some […]

Poll Shows Bush Popularity on Iraq Plummeting A new ABC/Washington Post poll shows the number of Americans who approve of Bush’s handling of Iraq way down. Gary Langer tells us: * ‘ [Bush’s] approval specifically on Iraq was 75 percent as the main fighting ended [in 2003]; it’s 39 percent now, a career low. ‘ […]