Juan Cole

The Increasingly desperate Baath regime in Syria appears to be seeking skirmishes with Israel as a way of shoring up its nationalist credentials. If the regime were under fire from Israel, that would put the rebels in the position of acting as allies of Tel Aviv and so discrediting them. Hence, Syria’s troops fired at […]

My column is out at Truthdig, looking at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s muscular new role in the Eastern Mediterranean and Syria: Excerpt: “Even as Damascus pushes back against the rebels militarily, Putin has swung into action on the international and regional stages. The Russian government persuaded U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to support an […]

Mattea Kramer and Jo Comerford write at Tomdispatch: The streets are so much darker now, since money for streetlights is rarely available to municipal governments. The national parks began closing down years ago. Some are already being subdivided and sold to the highest bidder. Reports on bridges crumbling or even collapsing are commonplace. The air […]

Bombings killed at least 95 people on Monday in Iraq, with 10 car bombs going off in the capital of Baghdad alone. Two car bombs were detonated in the southern Shiite port city of Basra, and the mostly Sunni city of Samarra north of the capital was also attacked. Most of the violence seems to […]

The USG Open Source Center translates an interview by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov from Russian, treating Syria and Palestine. Russian Foreign Minister Discusses Syria, Palestinian Question in Interview to Lebanese TV Transcript of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s interview to Lebanese Television: “Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s Interview to Lebanese TV Channel Al-Mayadin, Moscow, […]

Any particular storm is weather, not climate. That is, it is a discrete event, whereas climate is a decades-long pattern of such events. But the pattern is worrisome. A hotter atmosphere, which we are producing by dumping 5 billion metric tons of pollution from burning coal, gas and petroleum right into our earth’s atmosphere, produces […]

Pakistan, a country 97 percent Muslim, has just made its first successful transition from one elected, civilian government to another since its founding in 1947. The country has had long bouts of military rule, and a history of coups against elected prime ministers, as well as, in the 1990s, a series of presidential decrees dismissing […]

Morocco has enormous solar and wind energy potential and plans to get 40% of its electricity from green energy sources by 2020, only 7 years from now. This documentary explores the potential of clean energy in a country with loads of wind and sunshine, estimating that it could produce 2000 times as much energy as […]

Clashes broke out on Sunday in a western suburb of Tunis and in the city of Kairouan at the Mosque of the Martyrs between Tunisian police and militants of the proscribed Ansar al-Sharia cell. Although the movement makes exaggerated claims for its adherents, I shouldn’t imagine they amount to more than a couple thousand core […]