Juan Cole

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 […]

Oil Workers and Privatization of Iraqi Petroleum An oil workers union in Basra, organized after the fall of the Baath regime, may be the strongest guarantee against the privatization of the Iraqi oil industry. But given how broke the Iraqi government would be without the petroleum income, I don’t think there is any chance it […]

Services Have “Gotten Worse” A returning aid worker for the AFSC says of Iraq: Finally, the city grew too dangerous for Westerners and they left, concerned that they were putting not only their lives in danger but also the lives of the Iraqis that they interacted with. McDowell’s job had been to assess the conditions […]

Talabani President The Iraqi National Assembly is set to announce the formation of a presidential council on Wednesday, selecting Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani as president, Adil Abdul Mahdi as a vice president, and Ghazi al-Yawar as the other vice president. Abdul Mahdi is a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq who […]

Huhn? The Real Iraq The unfortunate tendency in the United States to evaluate all statements about Iraq with regard to whether they are “optimistic” (i.e. pro-Bush) or “pessimistic” (i.e. anti-Bush) makes it difficult for those who just want to understand what is going on. I get slammed by the Jeff Jarvis’s for reporting bad news […]

Another Bombing at Abu Ghraib Sunni Meeting Collapses in Acrimony Guerrillas mounted another bombing attack on Abu Ghuraib prison (this one involving a tractor), leaving 5 Iraqi civilians wounded. On Sunday, a combination of car bombings and mortar attacks wounded dozens of Americans and Iraqis. The NYT reveals that a rumor is going around that […]

Wesley Clark Conference Call Wesley Clark held a conference call on the situation in Iraq with some bloggers Monday afternoon, in advance of testifying in Washington on the situation. He began by pointing out that the US military made an assessment in September of 2002 that it could hold Iraq with 70,000 troops. [I had […]