Juan Cole

The news in the US is about several terrorist plots, some by Christians and some by Muslim expatriates, which have been averted by good police work, by the FBI and its local colleagues. In Pakistan, the news is about a terrorist plot that was not averted. Update: Two further blasts in the Northwest brought the […]

Usama Bin Laden’s latest screed on the Western evacutation from Afghanistan is the height of hypocrisy, since Bin Laden actively connived at getting Western troops to go there. Abdel Bar Atwan is a prominent Arab journalist and intellectual. Here what he said about his meeting with Bin Laden in 1996: ‘ Osama Bin Laden told […]

So I did this posting on Thursday night, below, on how I perceive President Obama to be maneuvering Iran into a box, wherein it faced increasing chances of the ratcheting up of sanctions by the United Nations Security Council. Then I went to bed and got on a plane the next morning and checked in […]

President Obama is slowly putting Iran in a box. His cancellation of the useless and expensive so-called “missile shield” program in eastern Europe, which had needlessly antagonized Russia, has been rewarded with greater Russian cooperativeness on Iran. The US right wing accused Obama of a failure of nerve. But in fact his move was shrewd […]

Aljazeera English reports on Ahmadinejad’s appearance at the United Nations: IRNA gives lengthy excerpts from Ahmadinejad’s address at the United Nations. ‘ President Ahmadinejad, who began his address thanking Almighty God for having granted him the chance to attend the “important global assembly”, said that he had already spoken to world leaders about the major […]

Ido Oren and Ty Solomon write in a guest op-ed for IC: Five years ago, Charles Duelfer, Head of the Iraq Survey Group, presented to Congress the final report of his 1200 member team, which concluded that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction when it was invaded by the United States in 2003. […]

The NYT says that President Barack Obama is reconsidering his plan to greatly increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan, and to be suffering “buyer’s remorse” for sending 21,000 more troops there soon after his inauguration and before a proper policy review. The article suggests a stark difference of opinion between vice president Joe […]

Top challenges for Obama at the United Nations this week, including Tuesday’s climate conference, and then the G20 on Thursday and Friday. In many instances, we can blame the difficult position he will find himself in on the US Senate. 1. Obama came into office with an ambitious agenda to develop alternative energy and cut […]

My column is out in Salon.com, on the way in which Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are turning Iran into a pariah state. I warn that if they keep going down this path, they are going to end up like North Korea. Excerpt: ‘Iran’s hard-liners are pushing their country into a dangerous and perhaps crippling isolation that […]