Juan Cole

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 […]

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 […]