Juan Cole

Democracy by George? My essay, “Democracy — by George? President Bush and his supporters are taking credit for spreading freedom across the Middle East. Here’s why they’re wrong” – is out today at Salon.com’s opinion section. My op-ed, “US Caught in the Cross-Fire,” which takes stock of what is likely to happen in Iraq during […]

Women bloggers (and other quiet people) Jeanne at Body and Soul has some thoughtful and right-on observations on the Levy/ Jarvis debate I discussed below, on whether the white male dominance of the more popular parts of the blogosphere is a good thing.

The Blogging Phenomenon Steven Levy at Newsweek asks why blogging is dominated by white males, and what the implications of this configuration are if blogging replaces traditional media. He quotes presenters at a recent Harvard conference who worried that the newsrooms of the major print media have only recently begun to be diversified with regard […]

Parliament Meets with No Government Guerrillas detonated at least five car bombs in Iraq on Tuesday. They detonated another at Baqubah early on Wednesday, killing 3 Iraqi soldiers and wounding several others. The Iraqi parliament meets for the first time Wednesday, but it is mainly a ceremonial event. The natural function of such a meeting, […]

Citizenship Requested for Sistani Kurdish-Shiite-Sunni Negotiations Al-Zaman The provincial council of Najaf, now dominated by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, requested that the first act of the Iraqi parliament once it is seated on March 16 be to grant Iraqi citizenship to Grand Ayatollah Alis Sistani. Sistani’s family immigrated to Iraq from […]

Halliburton Over Charges US Halliburton appears to have charged the US government $27 million to deliver $84,000 worth of fuel to Iraq. Everywhere you dig there are bodies. The NYT says that Halliburton over-charged the US government $108 million.

Dueling Demonstrations in Lebanon In the duel of the demonstrations in Lebanon, the political opposition (a coalition of Christians, Druze and some Sunni Arabs), brought out hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in downtown Beirut on Monday, the one-month anniversary of the assassination of former Lebanese PM Rafiq al-Hariri. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat says there had been a […]

Shiite-Kurdish Deal Collapses Al-Hayat: The Shiite/Kurdish negotiations to form a government before parliament is seated on March 16 have fallen apart, apparently because the Kurds reneged on the deal they had worked out with the United Iraqi Alliance. Al-Zaman reports that a high Kurdish official said that the process has never been closer to gridlock […]

Mosul Bombing Leaves Legacy of Sectarian Bitterness Al-Hayat: On the security front, 16 Iraqis were killed on Sunday, along with 3 US troops, in separate attacks to the north and south of Baghdad. The Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ahmad al-Hasani al-Baghdadi, head of the Fatwa Office of Baghdad, accused US ambassador John Negroponte of being involved […]