Juan Cole

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 […]

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 […]