Juan Cole

This is the story of two Joe Wilsons, and two Americas. Both challenged a president, the most powerful man in the free world. One is a liar and the other is a courageous truth-teller. One enjoys impunity for his falsehood and epochal rudeness, bespeaking an America ruled with civility and tolerance. The other was subjected […]

A suicide truck bomber detonated his payload in a Kurdish village near Mosul early Thursday morning, killing 19 and wounding 25. The attack followed a pattern in northern Iraq of Sunni Arab guerrilla groups attacking Kurds, apparently in hopes of provoking an Arab-Kurdish civil war. In the aftermath of such a destructive struggle, they appear […]

Here is the ranking by health researchers of 19 industrialized nations by how well their health systems intervene to stop preventable deaths. The US is now dead last at number 19, below not only France and Japan but also Denmark and New Zealand. (Original study here in pdf.) The US has fallen four places in […]

Jonathan Landay of McClatchy reports as an eye-witness on the guerrilla attack in Kunar Province on an Afghan Army expedition to Ganjgal village that killed 4 US marine trainers. AFP says that 10 Afghan army personnel and one policeman were killed and ten others wounded. Landay’s powerful, Hemingwayesque account of the ambush reveals the flinty […]

Jim Krane writes in a guest op-ed for IC The contrast is startling. Dubai is Iran’s window through the US embargo, one of its largest trading partners, and an offshore Mecca for Iranian business. “Dubai is the most important city on earth to the Islamic Republic of Iran, with the exception of Tehran,” says Saeed […]

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that the Islamic Mission Party [Da’wa] headed by Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki is holding public demonstrations against Syria over its alleged role in harboring Baathist terrorists that hit Iraqi government buildings two Wednesdays ago. The demonstration in al-Hillah south of Baghdad on Monday did not strike me as that impressive, […]

The unemployment rate as I write is inching toward 10 percent nationally, and that is only counting people who were still looking for a job recently. A vast bank robbery by the corrupt on Wall Street has deprived them of the credit that made the economy go. Labor Day was passed by Congress under Grover […]

A Taliban-set roadside bomb hit a German convoy in Kunduz province on Saturday, likely in vengeance for the NATO air strike on hijacked fuel trucks that killed so many locals. Four German soldiers were lightly injured. On Sunday morning, another US soldier was killed, in eastern Afghanistan. The Taliban are becoming increasingly proficient in laying […]

Journalist Besan Sheikh recently visited the Guantanamo Bay prison facility run by the US, where al-Qaeda and other prisoners from Bush’s ‘war on terror’ are held. (Many of the prisoners appear to have been sold by the Taliban or swept up indiscriminately in the vicinity of a battlefield). Sheikh told the pan-Arab London daily, al-Hayat […]