Juan Cole

Iraqi Resistance sees itself as Fighting Occupation Mitchell Prothero of UPI has found a source among the guerrillas willing to explain the nature of the Iraqi resistance. It is decentralized; much or most of it is not religious; and it has people in it who initially thought well of the US but came to believe […]

US Using Israeli Military to Train Special Ops to fight Iraqis Julian Borger of the Guardian reports that the Israeli army has sent “urban warfare specialists” to Ft. Bragg in North Carolina, to help train US Special Forces personnel for operations in Iraq. He says that according to two sources, Israeli military “consultants” have also […]

Carnegie’s Arab Reform Bulletin I did not get time to do it when it came out, but I wanted to direct readers to the recent Arab Reform Bulletin put out by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which considers issues in the political development of contemporary Iraq. I’ve got a piece there, as do Peter […]

1 US Soldier Killed, 2 Wounded in Mosul Guerrillas used a roadside bomb to kill one US soldier and wound 2 others from the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul on Sunday. Also, guerrillas bombed a train near Samarra, detaching 12 cars and putting the rail link out of commission for a week or so, according […]

al-Da`wa Party will act as Intermediary for Muqtada The Shiite al-Da`wa Party announced that it would attempt to negotiate a truce between radical young Shiite preacher Muqtada al-Sadr and the Americans. (al-Zaman). Muqtada recently announced that he would call fo a general strike in February to protest the jailing of a number of his followers. […]

Hilla Demonstrations Point to problems of Legitimacy Mariam Fam of AP notes that there has been a popular movement of protest against the American-appointed mayor of the Shiite city of Hillah. His opponents accuse him of having been a Baath party member, of having collaborated, and of being corrupt and nepotistic. There have been similar […]

Gas and Electricity Shortages Return Glen Carey of USA Today reports that gasoline/ petrol and electricity shortages have returned to Baghdad, raising anxieties among Iraqis about how they will make it through the winter. The fall-off in megawattage and gasoline has to do in part with sabotage, since guerrillas have launched numerous attacks against pipelines, […]

Controversies about New Security Agency in Iraq In the 1980s, Saddam employed tens of thousands of persons in the Ministry of the Interior (analogous to the US FBI) and related organs, for the purpose of domestic spying on Iraqis. Some have asserted that the number of snitches was greater than the number of all the […]

Stages of American Iraq, and Parallels I was on an Iraq panel at MIT on Friday with Ivo Daalder,, co-author of the just-published America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy. I found his views of how the policy in Iraq has developed very interesting, and they provoked me to some thoughts of my own. […]