Juan Cole

2 US Troops, 15 Others killed 17 persons died in violent attacks in Iraq on Thursday, including two US troops. Al-Hayat reports that Grand Ayatollah met with the Chaldean Patriarch. The grand ayatollah urged Christian Iraqis to vote, and condemned attacks on Christian churches by what he called “takfiri” forces. The practice of declaring some […]

Breaking News: Film Crew May have Smoking Gun A US film crew has footage of the explosives at al-Qaqaa that later went missing. This development may be the downside of embedding for the US military. It makes things hard to deny later on if you leave a filmed trail. For instance, the Russians can’t have […]

Iraqi Officials Deny Early Disappearance of Explosives Dr. Muhammad Sharaa who leads Iraq’s science monitoring department, denies that the 380 tons of high explosives that has gone missing could have been moved in spring of 2003 before or during the war. AFP reports: “It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this […]

Brown: 2004 Bremer Report on al-Qaqaa Looting Professor Nathan Brown of George Washington University writes: In the dispute between the Kerry campaign and the Bush administration over the disappearance of explosives at al-Qaqaa, the core of the Bush defense is that we don’t know when the explosives disappeared; it could have happened before American troops […]

Qazi tries to Forestall Sunni Boycott of Elections Az-Zaman: United Nations special envoy to Iraq, Ashraf Jahangir Qazi, held talks on Wednesday with Shaikh Muhammad Bashar al-Faydi, a leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars. They discussed the AMS attitude toward the January elections as well as the situation in Fallujah, which continues to be […]

Deadly Dual Use Explosives Missing: Part Deux The politicization of news in the United States has reached such an embarrassing point that what Vice Presidential candidate Dick Cheney thinks about what was going on in Iraq in April of 2003 is being reported by the press in an article on the weapons’ disappearance, even though […]

Bush will ask for another $70 Billion Allawi Slams Bush over Troop Massacre The Bush administration will ask for another $70 billion for Iraq in another month or two if re-elected. Remember in the debates when Kerry said Iraq had cost $200 billion, and Bush corrected him that it was only $120 billion? Well, it […]

10 Killed in four bombings, Including US Soldier Charges of Corruption In Halliburton Bids AP reports that that on Monday, guerrillas bombed four coalition and Iraqi military convoys on Monday, killing 8. Among the dead was one American and one Estonian soldier. Guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb in western Baghdad, killing 1 US soldier and […]

Bush is Making us Safer? The complete lack of interest of the Bush administration in actually securing dangerous materials connected to the old, abandoned Iraqi nuclear program has long belied Bush’s stated concern with Iraq’s alleged weapons as a pretext for the war. James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger with Khalid al-Ansary […]