Juan Cole

Kurdish Nationalism Kurdish writer Sabah Salih has an interesting piece on the way the image of the Kurds has changed among European leftists from that of victim to that of collaborator with American imperialism. He suggests that European sympathy for Kurdish nationalism has correspondingly declined. He says that I oppose the creation of a Kurdistan […]

Fresh Wave of Violence in Iraq 5 US troops Killed The relentless guerrilla war continued apace in Iraq on Sunday. AFP reported that guerrillas killed two Marines in clashes on Sunday. Also, in Anbar province, guerrillas killed three US servicemen on Sunday, and two had died there on Friday. A bomb exploded on the road […]

Henry Siegman in the New York Review of Books Amid the unwarranted outbreak of optimism about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the wake of Yasser Arafat’s death, Henry Siegman’s essay in the New York Review of Books on Ariel Sharon’s true plans comes as a breath of fresh air. Sharon is giving lip service to things […]

Shock of the Week: Liberals in Liberal Arts George Will’s column this week is unusually unreflective. I don’t often agree with Will, but he is usually a bright and well-informed columnist on the Reaganaut Right. He knows enough to castigate Justice Scalia for saying that Darwinian evolution is “only a theory” (a theory is a […]

Elections in Iraq will be Held on Schedule, But with What Result? Or, how Khatami and Krauthammer are Both Wrong At least 12 persons died violently in the guerrilla war on Saturday in Iraq. There was a major battle over control of police stations in Khalis, and Marines found more bodies in Mosul. The US […]

Supporting Nawal Saadawi Al-Hayat on Saturday ran an attack from a Muslim fundamentalist point of view on Egyptian novelist Nawal Saadawi. She recently argued that children should all receive hyphenated last names, from both the mother’s and the father’s side, instead of only the last name of the father. She said that this method would […]

Things are Not What they Seem Department On Thursday night on the David Letterman Late Night show on CBS, actress Natalie Portman announced that she was studying Arabic. On Friday night on the LBC Arabic satellite network the main attraction was a karaoke contest that involved a fair number of old American disco songs from […]

Election Plans Roiled Sunni Extremist Death Threats against Sistani Hamza Hendawi of AP reports that the Shiite vote may get split. He says that Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is declining to join the mega-Shiite party list toward which Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is working. Likewise, it is not clear that Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers […]

Iraq and Damned Statistics The Red Crescent has finally been allowed into Fallujah (its earlier exclusion was probably a violation of international law). Its spokesman is saying that less than 200 civilian families appear to still be there. If this estimate is true, it suggests that by the time of the US assault, only about […]