Juan Cole

Opinion Polls in Iraq My allegation that the IraqTheModel website is far outside the norm of Iraqi public opinion as measured by polling has caused a stir in the weblogging world among, apparently, dittoheads who can’t read polls. Here are the results of an April, 2004, Gallup poll, which was scientifically weighted and involved over […]

Abroad I’m going to be out of town for a few days. I think I will be able to do some posting, but just a head’s up that it may not be as regular as usual. As luck would have it, I’m getting an error message at Blogger, so am doing this manually. It should […]

Carbomb targets Green Zone Again Electricity Outage in All Iraqi Cities for Second Straight Day A car bomber struck the same Green Zone checkpoint again Tuesday morning as had been targeted on Monday. LBC satellite television is reporting one Iraqi National Guardsman killed and twelver persons seriously wounded. Two Marines were killed by guerrilla action […]

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 [Addendum 12/27/2004: This posting contains errors and is superceded by this later statement.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 […]