Juan Cole

Shiite Crowds, Preachers, Denounce Interim Constitution az-Zaman, ash-Sharq al-Awsat; wire services: The Shiite clerical leader Muhammad al-Ya`qubi called on high school students and students in institutes and colleges throughout Iraq to announce a strike on Saturday, in protest against the contents of the Basic Law or interim constitution. Over 1,000 Shiites demonstrated Friday in the […]

Wave of Killings at Sunni Mosques Reuters reports on a wave of killings at Sunni mosques. Both worshippers and Sunni clerics have been killed. Some of the mosques attacked are in poor, largely Shiite neighborhoods, and some suspect Shiite militias are the culprits. (The more radical Sadrists are being spoken of without being named, I […]

Red Herrings on Discount at Washington Post Poor Dana Priest at the Washington Post caught the frankly shitty assignment of summarizing Undersecretary of Defense for Planning Doug Feith’s self-defense against Democratic critics. The article is a mere repeat of statements made to the press by Feith on June 4, 2003, and contains nothing new. It […]

ETA or al-Qaeda? Madrid Bombing’s Significance Unknown As Steve Komarow argues, the full implications of the sanguinary bombings in Spain on Thursday depend on who did it. If it was ETA, the Basque separatist organization, then it would tend to be seen by the rest of the world as of mainly local significance. If it […]

Sistani doesn’t Want Brahimi to Come Back al-Hayat newspaper maintains that it was told by a high Frendh official that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani opposes the return to Iraq of special UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. He is said to be happy with the Shiite majority on the Interim Governing Council, and to fear that Brahimi […]

US Intelligence Follies: Why Haven’t Cheney, Feith and Chalabi been Impeached? While everyone is beating up on John Kerry for letting it slip he thinks the Bushies are crooked, we might ponder the sort of thing that might have led him to this impression. It seems fairly obvious by now that the Bush administration likes […]

Sistani warns of his own Assassination, Civil War al-Hayat: Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, March’s president-for-a-month of the Interim Governing Council, revealed in a news conference on Wednesday that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had warned late last week that “the enemies of Iraq” were “plotting to kill him [Sistani] in order to spark a civil war in […]

Wave of Kidnappings Continues in Baghdad Jack Fairweather of the Independent reports that the wave of kidnappings that has racked Baghdad continues, at an average of 2 a day. The typical ransom is $25,000. If we extrapolate out that rate, it is 720 abductions per 5 million people per annum (.014 percent of the population […]

More on Interim Constitution Roger Myerson, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, shared with me the following on the Interim Constitution, and has kindly consented to my reprinting it here: “Article 55 . . .may be a key to the evolution of power in Iraq. This article specifies that any group that […]