Juan Cole

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 […]

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 […]