Juan Cole

Bomb Blast Rocks Shrine City of Karbala; 13 Injured AFP is reporting that guerrillas left a bomb in a package in the center of the Shiite holy city of Karbala, near the shrine of Abbas, the brother of Imam Husayn. They detonated it around 10 pm Sunday night, injuring 13. The largely Sunni Baath remnants […]

23 Killed (2 Americans), 130 Injured (including 6 Americans) in Baghdad Car Bombing AFP has raised the casualty count to as many as 23-25 killed and 130 wounded in the Baghdad car bombing of the US headquarters there. “The huge explosion turned the busy central Baghdad street outside into a battlefield inferno but the headquarters […]

Benny Morris on the Arabs There is an interesting discussion going on over at H-Mideast-Politics about a recent interview given by Israeli “New Historian” Benny Morris, who is increasingly a neoconservative. See especially the comment of Alan Fisher, professor of Middle East History at Michigan State University.

Whistle-Blower on US Dirty Tricks at UN to be Tried in UK The Guardian reports that Britain’s Katherine Gunn may face two years in prison for whistleblowing on American dirty tricks at the United Nations. She made public a memo that reveals US intentions to spy on the UN delegations of the six “swing vote” […]

3 US Soldiers Killed North of Baghdad Guerillas in the cane fields north of Baghdad detonated an enormous bomb on Saturday as a US military convoy went by, turning a 30 ton vehicle upside down and killing 3 US soldiers. Their deaths took the death total to over 500. The press has concentrated on the […]

Latest Tomgram on Chalmers and the US Military Tom Engelhardt’s Tomdispatch.com at the Nation Institute is always entertaining and insightful. For anyone interested in the debate on the new American empire (which actually doesn’t seem to be going very well, since it is being overruled by Kurdish militiamen and grand ayatollahs), his comments and quotation […]

Cobban on CPA Laws and Transition to new Iraqi Government Veteran journalist and blogger Helena Cobban wrote in with further remarks on the issue of whether Coalition Provisional Authority regulations in Iraq are likely to survive the transition to an Iraqi government. I quote her below with kind permission. “Nathan Brown says this: “My impression […]

Bomb in Baghdad Kills 1, Wounds 3 AP reports, “The bloodshed persisted in Baghdad Friday, as a roadside bomb missed American troops but killed one Iraqi boy and wounded three others as they played soccer along a busy street. The U.S. command also announced an investigation into alleged abuse of Iraqi prisoners.”

Shiite Preachers throughout Iraq support Sistani, Slam US Plans as “Colonialism.” al-Hayat reported that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s representative in Karbala, Shaikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala’i, warned that the coming days will witness demonstrations and strikes, and possibly confrontations with the occupation [Coalition] forces if they insist on “their colonialist plot and in designing the politics […]