Juan Cole

Ministries to become Independent in April; Shiite-Kurdish Disputes Fester (al-Hayat) Raghida Dergham of al-Hayat : Nasrin Barwari, the minister of public works, affirmed on Wednesday that four ministries will be turned over to Iraqi sovereignty in the beginning of April. These are education, health, water utilities, and public works. She said that “the Coalition advisers […]

Brown: CPA Legislation to Shape Iraq’s Future Professor Nathan Brown of George Washington University, a major figure in the US study of Middle Eastern law and politics, comments on the recent CPA rules signed by Paul Bremer: “The CPA has recently issued a series of legal enactments (‘Orders”) that give a little more sense of […]

Demonstrations, Denunciations in Iraq over Sharon Murder of Sheikh Yassin Xinhua reports that a wide range of Iraqi political forces on Tuesday condemned Sharon’s murder of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a religious leader of Hamas, the day before. The Board of Muslim clerics in Fallujah, 50 km west of Baghdad, “condemned the assassination and promised immediate […]

Sharon’s Murder of Yassin Endangers Americans in Iraq and Elsewhere David R. Sands makes excellent points about the connection between Ariel Sharon’s murder of Shaikh Ahmed Yassin on Monday and the security of Americans in Iraq and elsewhere. (I use the word “murder” to refer to extra-judicial killing outside the framework of conventional war between […]

US HQ Receives Rocket Fire; Elsewhere US soldiers Killed, Wounded Wire services report that the US headquarters in Iraq was targeted by rocket fire Sunday morning, with other explosives landing elsewhere in downtown Baghdad. The attack was remarkable for being launched during the day, and that it could be pulled off at that time is […]

Clarke: Bush Pressured him to Find Iraq link to 9/11 Dick Clarke’s interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes struck me as powerful and credible. I was struck by the phrase that the Bush administration officials, like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, were still fighting the cold war and Iraq (“as though preserved in amber”) when they came back […]

Sistani: UN must not Legitimate Interim Constitution Reuters reports that Grand Ayatollah Sistani sent a letter to Lakhdar Brahimi, special envoy of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, demanding that the United Nations not endorse the interim constitution signed in early March by the Interim Governing Council. These are the Sistani quotes in the article: “The (Shi’ite) […]

Bremer enacts new Investment Law for Iraq ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Civil administrator Paul Bremer signed Law Number 64 on Sunday, altering the Iraqi law of corporations (which had been enacted in 1997), changing the legal climate for commercial enterprises in Iraq. The new law removes obstacles that had prevented the formation of Iraqi commercial institutions, permits […]

Reprisals by Assassination against Baathists az-Zaman: Iraqi sources connected to the ministry of the interior (=FBI in American terms, MI5 in British ones) say that 1,000 Iraqis were assassinated in the months following the fall of Saddam from among the cadres of scientists and artistic and cultural figures, the majority of them physicians, professors, engineers […]