Juan Cole

National Council Elects 4 Vice-Chairmen AP reports, ‘ In Baghdad, mortar rounds landed near a convention center where members of Iraq’s 100-member transitional assembly, known as the Iraqi Council, gathered for a meeting. Despite the explosions, delegates elected four vice chairmen of the National Council, which is intended to act as a watchdog over the […]

Iraqi Government Extends Ban on al-Jazeerah The caretaker Allawi government extended its ban on al-Jazeerah on Saturday. Al-Jazeerah itself reported that the government charged it with instigating attacks on its officials. Al-Jazeerah reports on Iraq quite extensively, and often manages to get better video and interviews than most Western news programs, so the closing of […]

Najaf: The Aftermath as Viewed by Iraqis Abbas Kadhim evaluates “Sistan’s triumph” at al-Ahram Weekly. He writes: The real winner at the end of the crisis was Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani. His return home from a trip to London for medical treatment accomplished a lot for him and for the disputants alike. First, his return cast […]

AIPAC Spy Case Update Knight Ridder’s Warren Strobel, who reported a week ago that the FBI investigation of Lawrence Franklin was part of a much larger probe of the pro-Likud Neocon clique in Washington (he didn’t put it exactly like that) is increasingly being vindicated as the papers of record pick up the story. The […]

Iraq War Continues into Month 17 Dozens Killed, nearly 100 wounded in Multiple Clashes, Bombings The events in Iraq on Friday and Saturday, stretching from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south, underline that the war in Iraq never ended, and that the country has now seen over seventeen months of virtually continual […]

Two US Soldiers Wounded Demonstration at Fallujah Two US troops were injured near Tikrit on Friday. There was a demonstration in Fallujah about the ongoing US bombing of the city. Al-Jazeerah showed videotape. I saw one cleric angrily denouncing the Allawi government for permitting foreigners to bomb its own citizens. It struck me that the […]

Sullivan on Cole Andrew Sullivan quoted some of my weblog on why things went wrong in Iraq, admitting I had some good points even if I was being too negative for his taste. Then he cited the following from my blog: “So it wasn’t a catastrophic success that caused the problem. It was that Iraq […]

The CEO Test for Bush Bush gave a long speech Thursday night, which sounded like a laundry list of promises more than anything else. He pointed to few genuine accomplishments during the past four years, and seemed stuck in fall, 2001. If you think about George W. Bush as CEO of America, Inc., it becomes […]

Qaradawi Calls for Attacks on Americans in Iraq Shaikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an old time Muslim Brotherhood cleric resident in Qatar, has called for Muslims to “fight” Americans in Iraq, whether troops or civilians, because they are occupiers. Al-Jazeerah.net says, ‘ “All of them (US military personnel and civilians) are invaders who came from their country […]