Juan Cole

On the Virtues of Changing the Mind It is depressing for me to see George W. Bush on the stump doing a stand-up comedy routine about John Kerry, parroting the predictable line that Kerry has had more than one opinion about Iraq. Serious news reporters who have gone back over the record find that Bush’s […]

Demolition of Old City in Najaf? I got two interesting messages about Najaf today. The first was from Dr. Kamil Mahdi, who has lectured in economics at Exeter University in the UK and is an Iraqi expatriate and former political exile: From: Kamil Mahdi Did you realise they are demolishing the old city of Najaf, […]

Pelosi Derails CIA Plan to Buy Iraq Elections Time Magazine reports that the Bush administration had had a plan to use the Central Intelligence Agency to funnel money to candidates it favored in the forthcoming Iraqi elections. The rationale given was that Iran was bankrolling its own candidates. This plan was apparently derailed in part […]

Sadrists to Boycott Elections: Daraji Shaikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji, a lieutenant of the young Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, said Monday that Muqtada would not contest elections while Iraq was suffering American occupation. He said he expected the Sadr Movement to boycott the elections. Darraji said, according to AFP, “We believe that the elections under occupation […]

Violence Kills 23 US Soldiers Wounded at Karama Al-Arabiyah is reporting that guerrillas detonated a car bomb near a national guard facility in Mosul, killing or wounding several persons on Monday morning. Also, US war planes attacked Sadr City on Monday, killing 5 and wounding 48. Al-Arabiyah showed wounded children in the hospital. A rocket […]

Bush Falsehoods about Iraq Adam Entous of Reuters is too polite to put it this way, but the conclusion is easily extracted from his article that Bush played fast and loose with the facts on Iraq last week. Bush said that the UN electoral advisers are on the ground. In fact, there are only a […]

5 US Troops, at least 9 Iraqis Dead Violence up 36 Percent in Iraq The incidents of violence on Friday and Saturday in Iraq that appeared in the newspapers were a very small proportion of the whole. The press did tell us that guerrillas killed 5 US troops in separate incidents on Friday and Saturday. […]

Two Faces of Bush This graphic is part of a new Democratic Party initiative to focus on the “two-facedness” of George W. Bush, which is apparently conceived broadly. The thing the graphic most reminded me of was Bush’s angry performance at the Cabinet meeting that discussed Fallujah in early April of 2004, where Newsweek says […]

US Assault on Ramadi Rockets in Baghdad Kill 4 Sadrists, AMS threaten Fresh Uprisings President George W. Bush cited a poll done in June and July to argue that Iraqis are more optimistic about their future than Americans are about theirs. First of all, even if this were true, it is not good news for […]