Juan Cole

Access Problems For mysterious reasons, some readers in the past week have been experiencing difficulty in accessing Informed Comment. For others, the problem has cleared up. I checked with my server provider and with Blogger, but haven’t had any report of a denial of service attack or any other obvious explanation. For those who can […]

Have Arabs or Muslims always Hated Jews? I said a couple of days ago that I regretted that the actions of Israeli hawks in the West Bank, Gaza and South Lebanon had produced an anti-Israeli and anti-American backlash in the Middle East and the Muslim world. I pointed out that that anger appears to have […]

7 Marines Killed in Anbar Huge Explosion in Baghdad Leaves Dozens Dead, Wounded Sunni Arab guerrillas killed 7 US troops on Sunday in separate incidents in al-Anbar province. Guerrillas detonated a powerful car bomb at a checkpoint at the Green Zone in downtown Baghdad, where government offices and the US embassy are barricaded in. Early […]

Assassination by Poisoning a Chancy Matter The confirmation that Ukraine presidential candidate Victor Yushchenko has been the victim of a poisoning by dioxyn shows that he was the victim of an assassination attempt. Former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, speaking on Wolf Blitzer’s Sunday show, suggested that the likely suspects included Ukrainian intelligence or […]

Manipulation of the Blogging World on Iraq? [Addendum 12/27/2004: This posting contains errors and is superceded by this later statement. Joseph Mailander of the Martini Republic weblog has an extremely important posting on Sunday about the dangers of “blog trolling.” To “troll” in the world of the internet is to lurk on a discussion board […]

Press Roundup for Sunday Guerrillas in al-Anbar province killed a US serviceman on Saturday. Anthony Shadid reports that Abdullah al-Janabi, fundamentalist Sunni leader of the Muslim mini-theocracy in pre-assault Fallujah, claims that the US military action has attracted hundreds of new fighters to the anti-American struggle in the Sunni Arab heartland. Shadid reports fighting in […]

70 Parties Register to Contest the Elections Al-Hayat reports that the Iraqi Islamic Party has registered a full party list of 275 candidates. The party, led by Muhsin Abdul Hamid, has long pushed for vigorous Sunni participation in the elections. Abdul Hamid is convinced that Sunni Arabs are a majority in Iraq (they are 20% […]

AIPAC Spying Case Heats up Richard Sales, veteran UPI terrorism correspondent, reveals the explosive information that ‘ In 2001, the FBI discovered new, “massive” Israeli spying operations in the East Coast, including New York and New Jersey, said one former senior U.S. government official. ‘ It was the uncovering of these spy rings that led […]

Press Roundup Reuters reports on a growing Iraq fuel crisis that could lead to civil turmoil and harm the prospects for elections. How ironic, if lack of fuel should roil Iraq of all places. According to the Guardian, a former CIA agent is suing the agency because he said he was pressured to conform to […]