Juan Cole

Wave of Assassinations Against Baathists in Wake of Saddam’s Capture Even before Saddam was captured on Dec. 13, a wave of assassinations of former Baathist officials had begun in Baghdad (following on a similar campaign in summer and fall in Basra). The assassinations appear to have accelerated now that the former Baathist leader is in […]

2 US Soldiers Wounded; 3 Iraqi police Killed by US Troops According to MSNBC, attacks on US forces and Iraqi police in the past few days have killed more than dozen persons in the Sunni Arab heartland. On Friday morning, guerrillas set off a roadside bomb northwest of Baghdad, wounding two US soldiers, according to […]

Lessons of Libya: War isn’t always Necessary Hawks in Washington will attempt to make the argument that Libya’s sudden willingness to give up its weapons of mass destruction programs is a dividend of the Iraq war. For those who know anything at all about Libya, however, an entirely different interpretation is obvious. Libya proves that […]

Coalition, Iraqi Police Extensively Infiltrated by Oppositionist Spies Chris Marks of the Scotsman reviews the ways in which the Coalition military and the Iraqi police were extensively infiltrated by Baath agents. This was a story, the skeleton of which ABC news broke a couple nights ago. Some 162,000 Iraqis work in security-related positions, and many […]

Rumsfeld, Bechtel and Iraq Well, the Democratic Party seems too nice or inept to do anything with it, but as the Washington Post points out, the good folks at the National Security Archive are continuing to document the long history of Republican Party coddling of Saddam Hussein, and their hypocritical winking at his use of […]

Breaking News: Shiite Badr Brigade HQ in Baghdad Bombed According to CNN, a huge bomb demolished the headquarters of the paramilitary Badr Brigade in Baghdad, the militia of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. It killed one woman and injured 8 others. The building also housed some displaced families, but Western news […]

1 US Soldier Killed, Another Wounded along with Translator Guerrillas in northwest Baghdad mounted an ambush late Wednesday on a 1st Armored Division convoy, killing one US soldier, and wounding another. An Iraqi interpreter was also wounded.

Al-Hakim to ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Saddam must be Tried in Iraq In an interview with the London daily ash-Sharq al-Awsat, Shiite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, current president of the Interim Governing Council, insisted that Saddam must be tried in Iraq by a war crimes tribunal. Apparently there has been some sort of controversy in the Shiite […]

Kofi Annan May visit Iraq; Tells Sistani Direct Elections Impractical Kofi Annan is seeking a Jan. 15 meeting with the countries involved in Iraq and with the Interim Governing Council, so as to determine what the UN role will be in that country. The UN was not mentioned in the November 15 agreement setting a […]