Juan Cole

Tsunami a Foretaste of Global Warming The horror of waves caroming across the Indian ocean at 500 miles an hour (the speed of a commercial jet liner!) and then crashing into beaches and shorelines at a height of as much as 30 feet, for all the world like liquid Godzilla, crushing sunbathers and carrying hapless […]

Suicide Bomber Kills 9, Wounds 39 Outside Home of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim A carbomber detonated his payload Monday morning outside the home in Baghdad of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, killing at least 9 persons and wounding 39. Al-Hakim’s mansion, taken over from former senior Baath official Tariq Aziz, is in the Jadiriyah quarter, and serves as […]

How to Save the Iraqi Elections (Reprint Edition) The following piece appeared in the Detroit News in early December: Sunday, December 5, 2004 Bush policies set off skirmish on fate of Iraqi elections Upcoming voting is headed toward train wreck unless U.S. sets aside legislative seats for Sunnis By Juan Cole / Special to The […]

IraqTheModel On December 12, just before I went off to Japan on a trip, I drew attention to a web log entry by Joseph Mailander at the Martini Republic, which raised questions about the bona fides of a web site run by three Iraqi brothers called IraqTheModel. Mailander had come to be suspicious of the […]

Bombings and Assassinations Mar Christmas Day in Iraq Douglas Ireland of the LA Weekly has a fine piece on the problems with the coverage of Iraq in the US media, and offers some helpful pointers on how to penetrate the fog of information war. Guerrillas detonated a car bomb on Saturday at Khan al-Nus, between […]

Study of Arabic in the US Harry Levins of the St. Louis Post Dispatch has an interesting article on the lack of Arabic speakers in the US. He says that a little over 10,000 students are now studying Arabic. That is a big increase from the 1980s, when it was about 2500, or from the […]

Hiding Christmas in Iraq The US Christian Right has been loudly complaining about the alleged exclusion of Christmas from the US public sphere. (There isn’t really any evidence of it.) But Iraq’s approximately 700,000 Christians actually are having to hide their celebrations for fear of violence from radical Muslim extremists. Borzou Daragahi reports that most […]

At Least 30 Killed, Dozens Wounded in Iraq Violence AFP and other wire services report that violence in Iraq on Friday killed at least 30 persons (including 24 guerrillas in Fallujah) and wounded dozens. Guerrillas blew up a fuel tanker in Baghdad near the Jordanian embassy, killing at least one person and wounding 19. A […]

Radical Militants on Planet al-Qaeda Wanted Bush to Win US Election Georges Malbrunot, one of two French journalists recently released by radical Muslim fundamentalists in Iraq, spoke to CNN on Friday: Malbrunot quoted his captors as saying Bush’s re-election “would improve our ability to fight . . . We vote for Bush because Bush help […]