By Juan Cole Hisham Melhem has a piece on what he calls the collapse of Arab civilization. The piece is riddled with contradictions and fuzzy thinking and with all due respect to Milhem, who is a knowledgeable and experienced correspondent, I am going to disagree with it vehemently. I think he is arguing that Arabs […]
Changing US-Iran Relations: Kerry: Iran has a Role in Defeating ISIL Militants
by Juan Cole Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday that Iran has a role to play in defeating ISIL. Addressing a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, he said that the military alliance put together by the US and its allies is only one part of the task, and that the other […]
Education, Health, and Global Warming: Top 5 Reasons 45% of Scots Wanted to Leave the Right Wing UK
by Juan Cole The US media coverage of the Scottish referendum is oddly lacking in any reference to actual politics. As usual, the corporate media concentrates on issues in ethnicity to cover up issues in social class and social policy. The “Washington consensus” of Neoliberalism, substituting blind so-called “market forces” for good governance, has been […]
Shiite Militias of Iraq Reject US Return, Threaten to Attack US Forces
By Juan Cole The pan-Arab, London-based daily, “Al-Sharq al-Awsat” (The Middle East) reports that the major Shiite militias of Iraq are denouncing Prime Minister Haydar al-Abadi for welcoming US air support in the fight against the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Prime Minister al-Abadi himself rejected conventional US ground troops for […]
Should US policy toward ISIL be Containment?
By Juan Cole The US launched air strikes on Tuesday on ISIL targets, south of Baghdad and also in the north. The ones south of Baghdad were in support of the Iraqi Army, for the first time since the ISIL crisis broke in early June. US close air support to the Iraqi army and the […]
Must Muslim Americans Condemn ISIL? Must Turkish Jews Condemn Gaza War?
By Juan Cole During the recent Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, a controversy broke out in Turkey about whether Turkish Jews were required to condemn Israel’s actions, as some pro-Palestinian Turks suggested. Turkish Jewish intellectuals wrote in an open letter to the newspaper Hurriyyet [“Liberty,” Istanbul]: “”Israel’s latest attack on Gaza led, once again, […]
Top 5 Contradictions in Obama’s Emerging ISIL Strategy
By Juan Cole In the past week, Secretary of State John Kerry has marshaled support of some sort from both European nations and from countries in the Middle East for the US push against ISIL. Unfortunately, the resulting coalition is riddled with contradictions that may well cripple it. Here a some of the more important […]
Media, Politicians should stop Letting ISIL Manipulate them
By Juan Cole Ever since George W. Bush invaded Iraq and created the circumstances under which al-Qaeda could take root and flourish there from 2003 forward, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (which later styled itself the “Islamic State of Iraq”) has taken captives and has beheaded them on film. It was doing this in 2004 These acts […]
Middle East “Allies” decline to Commit Forces, Resources against ISIL
By Juan Cole US Secretary of State John Kerry’s meeting in Jedda with ten Middle Eastern foreign ministers produced a communique on Friday, but little more. The regional states promised to do more to stop the transit across their territory of volunteer vigilantes seeking to join the so-called “Islamic State” of Iraq and the Levant […]
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