Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – In his less than three months in office, Donald Trump has escalated four wars, and all of his escalations have been failures. To be fair, Trump inherited all 4 wars from Barack Obama– Afghanistan, Iraq v. ISIL, Leftist Kurds v ISIL in Syria, and targeting support and […]
Can we survive simultaneous Trump, Ahmadinejad Presidencies?
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – BBC Monitoring, which translates foreign-language news reports, has a rundown on reactions in Persian to the surprise registration by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to run for president in the May 19 Iranian elections. Ahmadinejad was a complete disaster and made Iran a laughingstock by his erratic pronouncements, his […]
Washington’s demonization of Foes jumps Shark with Sean Spicer on Hitler
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – White House spokesman Sean Spicer is as ill-suited for his job as his boss Donald Trump is ill-suited for his own. The most astonishing things routinely slip from the lips of both. But Spicer’s belligerent malapropisms soared to new heights of WTF on Tuesday with his […]
Russia’s not Leaving: Syria is about old-Fashioned Sphere of Influence, not Oil
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Russia is not going to yield its sphere of influence in Syria to Donald Trump or anyone else. Russia has all but won the Syrian War as we speak. There is no longer any feasible pathway for the rebels to take the capital of Damascus. The […]
Sharpening Contradictions: ISIL Strikes Egyptian Christians on Palm Sunday
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) claimed responsibility Sunday for two suicide bombings at Christian churches in Lower Egypt on Palm Sunday, which left over 40 dead and over 100 wounded. The death toll would have been higher except that an Egyptian policeman stopped the suicide bomber in Alexandria […]
Al-Sadr: Russia, America and al-Assad should all get out of Syria!
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Iraqi Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on Saturday issued a broadside demanding that Russia and the United States withdraw from Syria and that strongman Bashar al-Assad resign as president. Al-Sadr’s stand against al-Assad is unusual among Shiite movements. The Lebanese Shiite militia, Hizbullah, has entered Syria to […]
Russia: US attack on our Sovereign ally Illegal
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday slammed the Trump administration for its strike on Syria, calling it “illegal” and based on faulty intelligence. The Russians reaffirmed that they will cease sharing their Syria flight information with the Americans. The information sharing had been done to avoid […]
Trump intervenes in the Great Mideast Civil War in Syria
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The Syrian Civil War has a domestic, a regional and an international dimension. Domestically, it has become a fight between some largely rural Sunni Arabs (though some are urban as in Ghouta), mostly now of a fundamentalist cast, on the one hand; and on the other […]
Washington’s Supreme Hypocrisy on Chemical Weapons and Civilian Deaths
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The use of chemical weapons by the Syrian Army in Idlib is an atrocity and the pictures of dead children tug at the heart. But the outrage of American politicians inside the beltway about it draws on the myths of American exceptionalism and Alzheimer’s of the […]
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