Juan Cole

Iraqi Economy Limping Along Because of Poor Security The Financial Times has a suggestive story on the Iraqi economy and its continued woes. One conclusion I draw from it is that a lot of the new money in people’s hands is going right out of the country for the purchase of electronics and automobiles from […]

Anti-Occupation Forces Reject National Congress A National Congress of 1,000 notables will be held for 3 days later in July. It will elect an advisory body of 100, which will have a veto power over some decisions of Prime Minister Allawi. This weak, Duma-like council was proposed by UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi as a means […]

Iraqi Women Being Dragged Backwards Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer brings back grim news about the situation of women from her recent trip to Iraq. She writes, ‘during my recent trip to Iraq, middle-class women spoke to me about their fears of moving backward after the U.S. invasion. A temporary code of law drafted […]

Feith Cell Under Attack from Senate The Telegraph points out that the annex to the Senate Intelligence report on failures leading to the Iraq war takes singular aim at Undersecretary of Defense for Planning, Douglas Feith, for having set up a cell in the Pentagon that briefed the White House on Iraq without the knowledge […]

Fatal Mortar Duels in Baghdad, Samarra Senate Tries to Make CIA the Fall Guy Correpondents in Iraq report that guerrillas launched mortar fire at the area around Sadeer Hotel, a favorite of foreigners on Friday. They killed a child and wounded three hotel guards. In Samarra to the north of Baghdad, mortar fire took the […]

Muqtada thanks Iran, Syria; Sumayd’i Criticizes Emergency Law as Undemocratic az-Zaman: Muqtada al-Sadr expressed his gratitude Friday to Iranian President Muhammad Khatami and Syrian President Bashar al-Asad for rejecting foreign presence in Iraq. He also criticized Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, in his Friday sermon, read for him at the Kufa mosque by Shaikh Jabir […]

Voice of America Staff Petition to Congress I received the following from Alan Heil regarding the Voice of America and the continued sinister attempts to abolish it in favor of an AM radio format. This gutting of intelligent US debate and self-presentation to the rest of the world is being spear-headed by the Broadcasting Board […]

5 US soldiers Killed, 20 Wounded at Samarra 4 Iraqis dead, 24 wounded AP reports that the chaos in Samarra spilled over Thursday onto the nearby US base. Guerrillas attacked the base with a car bomb and nearly 40 rounds of mortar fire. They killed 5 US soldiers, 1 Iraqi guardsman, and 3 civilians. Some […]

Guerrillas number over 20,000 Some honest US officials in Iraq are finally admitting that US forces are not meeting a vanguard of international terrorism there but rather some 20,000 angry Baathists who fear for the fate of Sunni Arabs in the new regime. This way of putting the problem suffers from conceptual problems, too. The […]