Juan Cole

President Barack Obama says he will be more honest than past presidents with Israel. Israel, a great friend of the United States and a country we like and admire on its merits, has nevertheless dug itself into a very deep hole with its determination to colonize the West Bank and to keep the Palestinians stateless. […]

A bomb at a bus station in Kohat, northern Pakistan, detonated on Sunday, killing one and wounding 8. It is suspected that this bombing is another in a series aimed by the predominantly rural Taliban at taking revenge on urban people for the campaign launched against them by Islamabad. As the Pakistani military claimed to […]

The USG Open Source Center translates an op-ed by Abd-al-Malik Ahmad Al Al-Shaykh welcoming president Obama to Saudi Arabia: Excerpts: Saudi Writer Hopes Obamas Visit Will Serve as Takeoff Point Toward Global PeaceArticle by Abd-al-Malik Ahmad Al Al-Shaykh: “Welcome to President Barack Obama”Al-Sharq al-Awsat OnlineSunday, May 31, 2009 Document Type: OSC Translated Text Your Excellency […]

The Pakistani military claims to have completely taken over the city of Mingora, the largest in Swat, and says that the campaign in Malakand Division will be completed within three days. ITN has video: This upload from CCTV gives some of the Pakistani military’s press conference: There is an urgent need for the fighting to […]

Trying it on for size. Provided free by this site. The Web is a moving target. My old template started displaying oddly to some people, with a purple patch on the text. I hadn’t changed the code, so it means that some CSS command started being interpreted differently by browsers. I tried fixing it manually, […]

An Iraqi guerrilla killed a US soldier with a grenade near Mosul on Friday, bringing the May total for deaths of US military personnel to 22, the highest since September (though only about half the deaths in May were from direct combat). In Baquba, a roadside bomb killed 6 civilians. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki of […]

The Pakistani military claims to have taken the village of Peochar and to have cleared it of militants. It was the headquarters of Mulla Fazlullah, a top leader of the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan. The military also claimed to have taken most of the major city of Mingora, which had had 300,000 inhabitants or so before […]

The Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan took further revenge on Thursday for the military campaign launched against it by the Pakistani military in the Swat Valley, by setting off bombs and ambushing police and security forces in the northwestern city of Peshawar, killing 12 and wounding 250. These attacks came on the heels of a major bombing […]

Republican poobah Newt Gingrich has lambasted Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor as a ‘racist’ because she implied that a Latina woman could empathize with certain situations as a judge better than a white male could, and so would come to sounder judgments. Just so everyone remembers, this is Newt Gingrich’s idea of the difference between […]