Juan Cole

Allawi resigns, Joins New Government Iyad Allawi has consented to join the new Iraqi government. He is demanding 4 of 31 cabinet posts for his Iraqiya Party, which only has 40 seats in the 275-member parliament, including at least one important cabinet post. Allawi has now submitted his resignation as prime minister and is dissolving […]

Of Bents and Teaching Daniel Drezner maintains that there are virtually no political science courses that deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict in the United States that have a “Zionist bent.” Well, I disagree, and I have lots of evidence for disagreeing. But anyway, Drezner has misunderstood my point. I don’t give a rat’s ass whether […]

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 […]