Juan Cole

My essay, “Armageddon at the Top of the World: Not!: A Century of Frenzy over the North-West Frontier,” has just been posted at Tomdispatch.com. Excerpt: ‘ Despite being among the poorest people in the world, the inhabitants of the craggy northwest of what is now Pakistan have managed to throw a series of frights into […]

William R. Polk writes in a guest editorial for IC: Probably like most of you, I am engaged in a daily attempt to make up my mind about President Obama. I was an early supporter. And as a former Washington “player,” I am aware how difficult is his position. I began to worry when he […]

On Sunday, the Change List in the Kurdistan Regional Government elections made the startling claim that it had won in Sulaimaniya, a long time stronghold of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan of aging Iraqi president Jalal Talabani. Noshirvan Mustafa, the leader of Change, broke with the PUK two years ago, alleging corruption and abuse of […]

Update: Taliban in Kunduz in Afghanistan’s north attempted to assassinate warlord Muhammad Qasim Fahim on Sunday, but failed. One of his bodyguards was wounded in the attack. There are few Taliban in the north, but there are some Pashtuns in Kunduz and some of them have been radicalized. The violence underscores how perilous the security […]

Aljazeera English reports on the Kurdistan elections: For the first time in recent memory, the two major Kurdish parties (which are in a sense clans and clan allies) are facing significant opposition, as from the Goran or Change Party. Critics of the joint government of Kurdistan President Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party and (Iraqi President) […]

This issue of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s appointment of Esfandiyar Rahim-Masha’i as his first vice president came to a head on Friday. Rahim-Masha’i, the father of Ahmadinejad’s daughter-in-law, had offended the hard liners last year by saying Iranians are friends of the Israeli people (as opposed to the ‘Zionist regime.’) Ahmadinejad was presumably, by his appointment […]

I have been saying for some time that the US military presence in Iraq is highly unlikely to completely end at the close of 2011. I think the important thing is that the combat troops will be out and that the tiny number who remain will mainly be trainers of Iraqi troops; there will likely […]

What did Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki want from his visit to New York City and Washington, DC? Al-Zaman [The Times of Baghdad] makes some suggestions in this regard. First, he wants the United Nations Security Council to remove Iraq altogether from Chapter 7 status under the UN Charter. After the Gulf War, the UNSC put […]

The US military has, understandably and correctly, condemned the coerced video of a US soldier taken hostage by Taliban in Afghanistan. But I fear that the argument that the public humiliation of prisoners is against international law won’t take the US very far after 8 years of Bush-Cheney. After the evidence surfaced that the US […]