Juan Cole

Montazeri Warns Iraqis Against Clerical Rule Ayatollah Husain Ali Montazeri of Qom warned [Persian link] the Iraqi political class on Friday against allowing clerics to dominate the executive in their new government. He spoke through his son to the Persian service of the BBC. He said that clerics were just not trained to or capable […]

A Pictorial Commentary on the first Line in Bush’s Inaugural Speech The full transcript is here. Pictures are clickable. ” . . . on this day prescribed by law and marked by ceremony, we celebrate the durable wisdom of our Constitution and recall the deep commitments that unite our country.” Let us consider the durable […]

Nine British Troops Wounded in Abuse-Related Blast Guerrillas targeted British troops at the Shaibah base near Basra with a suicide bombing, wounding nine, along with a number of civilians. It appears that the attack was prompted by the circulation of images showing British troops torturing Iraqi detainees. The images emerged in connection with the trial […]

Rice Doublespeak at Senate The transcript of the Rice/Boxer exchange is worth reading in full. Rice’s performance is breathtakingly bad, and Boxer has all the quotes and facts at her fingertips. The issue is that Condoleeza Rice engaged in demagoguery before the Iraq war. She invoked the image of a mushroom cloud over the United […]

Consensus Growing in Iraq for a Withdrawal Timetable Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leading figure in the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA the largely Shiite party that is likely to form the next Iraqi government), gave a press conference on Wednesday that I saw on LBC satellite television. Al-Hakim said that Iraqis did not want to continue […]

4 Bombs Shake Baghdad Wednesday Morning Condi Assures Senate Everything was Handled Properly and Everything will be All Right Guerrillas unleashed a terror campaign of bombings on the Iraqi capital Wednesday morning, as at least four big explosions shook several sites. Affected were the area near the Australian embassy, a police station, and the Green […]

Chalabi attacks Shaalan The rivalry between Iyad Allawi [Arabic link] and Ahmad Chalabi has heated up two weeks before the January 30 elections. Jon Lee Anderson points out in his New Yorker piece, Allawi was a long-time member of the Baath Party, and is now a secular, tough pragmatist. He organized other ex-Baathists, especially officers […]

IraqTheMOdel

Pace of Attacks picks up in Iraq, with Explosion Tuesday Morning in Baghdad, 24 Dead on Monday A big car bomb exploded outside the headquarters in Baghdad of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq on Tuesday morning. The number of casualties is unclear as I write. SCIRI is a leading Shiite party and […]