Juan Cole

SA-14 used in Attack on DHL Plane A videotape of guerrillas’ attack on the DHL plane at Baghdad airport was given to a French reporter for Le Nouvel Observateur. It was seen by AFP, which reports that it clearly shows the use of an SA-14 Gremlin missile launcher, not an old SA-7 as the US […]

Sistani’s Fatwa trumped Bremer Rajiv Chandrasekharan has a wonderful article in the Washington Post on the way Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s fatwa of June 28 stymied US civil administrator Paul Bremer. . This was the substance of my remarks on Nightline on Monday night, as well. Sistani insisted that drafters of a new Iraqi constitution […]

IGC Can’t Let Go Some members of the Interim Governing Council, which was set to be dissolved in June on the election of a new transitional government, are now saying they don’t want the IGC dissolved. They hope for it to stick around as a sort of Senate. Apparently the Shiites, like Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, […]

Banning al-Arabiya The real reason that al-Arabiya satellite television is being banned in Iraq is not that it showed videotapes of Saddam, but that it is a prime source of videotape of damage done to US troops by the guerrillas. Rumsfeld is desperate to stop such footage getting out, and cannot easily move against the […]

Halliburton accused of Gouging According to AFP, three Democratic leaders in Congress are charging Halliburton with gouging US taxpayers by charging $2.65 per gallon to transport gasoline from Kuwait to Iraq. Local Iraqi concerns do it for just under a dollar, and even the Pentagon folks (they of the $100 hammers) do it for for […]

al-Hakim: US Troops a Humiliation: Only a UN Resolution Can Authorize Them AFP reports that the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and member of the Interim Governing Council, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, has insisted that the presence of US troops in Iraq must be authorized by a United Nations resolution […]

Muqtada: The Only Real Solution is Immediate US Withdrawal John Daniszewski of the LA Times has an interview with Muqtada al-Sadr about the new plans for a transitional government. Like French President Jacques Chirac, Muqtada thinks it is too little and too far off. ‘Sadr dismissed the proposed hand-over of power by July 1 as […]

Why Breaking up Iraq is a Very, Very Bad Idea Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council for Foreign Affairs and a former NYT editor and columnist, argues in today’s NYT that the US should reconcile itself to Iraq splitting into three countries. I don’t entirely understand why he is pushing this agenda, and […]

How We Denied Democracy to the Middle East Robert Fisk’s essay, “How we denied democracy to the ME,” coming in response to Bush’s new policy statement, is worth reading. I think it is certainly the case that in the Cold War the US and Britain often did things to destroy democracy in the Middle East […]