Juan Cole

*About 5,000 Arab demonstrators rallied Saturday in Kirkuk, insisting that the US release Sheikh Hatam Al-Assy Al-Obeidi, a powerful tribal chieftain suspected in the sabotage of oil pipelines. They also demanded the resignation of Kirkuk’s Kurdish mayor, Abdul Rahman Zankane, saying that the city should be for all Iraqis, not just Kurds. (-AFP)

*Ex-Baathist provocateurs attempted to turn a peaceful demonstration by the unemployed in Basra into a violent riot on Saturday, but failed, according to al-Zaman. The Iraqi unemployment rate is usually given as 60%, and a lot of people are desperate.

*Officials in the northern city of Mosul (pop. 1.7 million) are saying that they have struck a deal with Syria such that it will provide the city with electricity in return for Iraqi petroleum. Such economic and political interactions between Iraq and Syria are inevitable, and raise severe questions about the American Enterprise Institute’s plan […]

*Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan angrily demanded a clarification from Iraq and the US about whether Turkish troops are wanted as peace enforcers. The new Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd, said that it was better if the Turks did not send troops. “’Otherwise, we are not that eager’ to get militarily involved, he […]

*For an expert look at some of the recent rather polemical books about Saudi Arabia, see long time Foreign Service Officer David Long’s review in the Forward. http://www.forward.com/issues/ 2003/03.09.05/arts1.long.html

*US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld blamed the Iraqis for their own lack of security, since they are not doing enough to tell the US forces in the country who the bombers are. Does anybody but me find this sort of rhetoric disgraceful? First of all, it lumps all Iraqis together. Do people in Najaf […]

My National Public Radio interview on All Things Considered for Saturday, September 6, 2003, about my correspondence with the late Lt. Kylan Jones-Huffman, is now available on the Web. Scroll down and click on the 3rd clip, “A Reservist’s Last Letters Home.” http://www.npr.org/rundowns/ rundown.php?prgId=2&prgDate=current.

*Two American soldiers were wounded Wednesday at al-Anbar University in Ramadi by a suicide bomber. On Thursday, a British bomb-disposal expert was killed at Mosul in an ambush. *I see a real and alarming change in tone in the usually optimistic al-Zaman newspaper, whose owner, Saad al-Bazzaz, is a member of Adnan Pachachi’s Iraqi Independent […]

*As President Bush went to the United Nations for a new resolution in Iraq, his representatives immediately met again with the Indian Foreign Secretary* Kanwal Sibal about the possibility of India providing a division, nearly 20,000 men. The last such request was rebuffed by the Indians on the grounds that there would have to be […]