By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – The Daesh (ISIL or ISIS) burning of a captured Jordanian pilot alive produced justified revulsion globally, resulting in the terrorist organization being termed “barbarous” and similar epithets. Why did it behave this way? Because it wants to terrify its opponents into submission and underline that it is too […]
Angry Jordanian Crowds Rally over ISIL Murder of Pilot, but some blame US, King
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – Jordanian protesters came out in the thousands on Tuesday to protest the gruesome murder by Daesh (ISIL, ISIL) of a captured Jordanian pilot, Muath al-Kasasbeh. He was from the central Jordanian town of Karak (pop. 70,000), 87 miles south of the capital of Amman, and crowds came out […]
GOP’s Scott Walker: Pitches possible Syria War to make us Like Him
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – Likely Republican presidential candidate, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, says he might favor sending US ground troops to mount a conventional war against Daesh (ISIL or ISIS) in Syria or at least wouldn’t rule it out. Let’s see. The Bush administration invaded Iraq in 2003 on false pretenses of […]
Journalist Greste Freed by Egyptian Junta, but Press Freedom still Hostage
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – Peter Greste, an Australian journalist working for Aljazeera English, has been released from an Egyptian prison after a 400-day ordeal in which he was jailed merely for reporting the news. Greste was preemptively released by a presidential pardon from Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the military dictator. Nothing is more […]
Ironies of Empire: US now Allied with Shiites Trained by Assassinated HIzbullah Leader
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – The revelation by the Washington Post’s Adam Goldman and Ellen Nakashima that the car-bomb assassination of Hizbullah commando Imad Mughniyah in Damascus in 2008 was a joint CIA/ Israeli Mossad operation comes at an awkward time for Washington. The administration of George W. Bush did not target Mughniyah […]
5 Top Reasons Romney ought to have Withdrawn
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – Likely the reasons Mitt Rimney decided not to run for a third time are financial – the big money just wouldn’t make another bet on a serial loser. But here is why he shouldn’t have even thought about running in a rational world: 1. In his famous slam […]
Why the Israeli-Hizbullah Tit for Tat Probably won’t turn to War
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – Last week an Israeli helicopter gunship targeted Hizbullah outposts in Syria southwest of Damascus, near the front with the rebel Support Front (Syria al-Qaeda), which controls the Golan Heights on the Syrian side. These outposts were not in fact bordering Israel or likely aimed at Israel, but rather […]
The Need for New Blood at State Dept.: Obama’s Problem with the ‘Vision Thing’
By Andrew J. Bacevich | (Tomdispatch.com) – En route back to Washington at the tail end of his most recent overseas trip, John Kerry, America’s peripatetic secretary of state, stopped off in France “to share a hug with all of Paris.” Whether Paris reciprocated the secretary’s embrace went unrecorded. Despite the requisite reference to General […]
Netanyahu & Boehner: How Israel went from being a Democratic to a Republican Project
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) — The audacity of Speaker of the House John Boehner colluding with the prime minister of a foreign country to undermine a sitting president is, I think, still not entirely appreciated. And the whole point of the plot with Binyamin Netanyahu is to stop a sitting president from successfully […]
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