Juan Cole

Rashid Khalidi’s talk at UCLA, “Government Attacks on Area Specialists Called Disservice to U.S. Middle East Policy,” is absolutely essential reading. Khalidi covers the group-think at the Pentagon, the exclusion and intimidation of State Department Middle East experts, the willful disregard by the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Feith crew of Middle East expertise generally, and the recent attempt to […]

3 US Marines Killed, 2 Injured; 2 Police Officers Killed in Continued Iraq Violence on Tuesday The Associated Press reports: Guerrillas killed three U.S. Marines and wounded two others with a roadside bomb in southeast Baghdad on Tuesday, damaging their Humvee. Also in Baghdad, guerrillas attacked a US patrol in the upscale Sunni Azamiyah district. […]

US Soldier Kept Hostage by Guerrillas is Killed The killing of Spc. Keith Matthew Maupin by guerrillas in Iraq marks the potential beginning of a new tactic in the Iraq war. For the most part, it is hard for the guerrillas to wreak much real damage on US troops in the country, who are well […]

Bremer Flees Iraq Two Days Early Paul Bremer suddenly left Iraq on Monday, having “transferred sovereignty” to the caretaker Iraqi government two days early. It is hard to interpret this move as anything but a precipitous flight. It is just speculation on my part, but I suspect that the Americans must have developed intelligence that […]

Fallujah Nir Rosen’s brave and essential reporting from Fallujah in the New Yorker is a must read. A taste: ‘ A young boy from Najaf wearing a pressed white shirt tucked neatly into bluejeans walked up to the lectern, and the microphone was lowered to accommodate him. The boy raised his right arm, pointing his […]

10 Killed in Iraq, including a US Soldier; One Marine Held Hostage A US Marine was taken hostage in Iraq on June 21, and the group that kidnapped him is now threatening to kill Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun. The fascist US pundits who keep intimating that Muslim-Americans or Arab Americans should be under suspicion after […]

Fahrenheit 9/11 I saw Michael Moore’s new film in Ann Arbor at the midnight show last Thursday, thinking I might say something about it over the weekend. But social commitments of a pleasant sort kept me away from the keyboard, and I don’t know when I will get to posting extended comments. The film is […]

$2 Billion Unaccounted for In CPA Handling of Iraq Finances The BBC reports that of nearly $20 billion in Iraqi money that the Coalition Provisional Authority had authority over during the past year, some $2 billion is unaccounted for. The report says, ‘ Helen Collinson, from Christian Aid, said: “For the entire year that the […]

Iraq Haunts Bush in Istanbul Nabil al-Tikriti, who teaches history part-time at Loyola University New Orleans, writes Sunday from Istanbul: ‘ Hello: There are 15 million people in Istanbul who [are extremely hostile to] Bush. So that he could get a private tour of Topkapi and the rest of Istanbul during this NATO summit, they […]