Juan Cole

There is something fishy about the Pakistani military’s reporting of its campaign against the Taliban in Swat, according to the Pakistani press. Dawn uses the phrase, “With scepticism growing about the progress of the month-old army offensive in the north-western region . . .” and notes, “From the air, there was little evidence of the […]

Veteran security reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren Strobel at McClatchy fact-check former vice president Dick Cheney’s speech defending torture and denouncing plans to close Guantanamo Bay Landay and Strobel catch the vice president in a whole series of falsehoods: The long and the short of it is that other high US officials doubt the […]

Bombings killed 23 persons in Iraq on Thursday, including, Iraqi officials maintain, 3 US soldiers. The attacks followed on a major bombing Wednesday that left 40 dead and 73 wounded in the largely Shiite, northern Shula district. In Baghdad, guerrillas carried out two significant bombings. One hit a market in Dora district, killing 9 Iraqis […]

The US Congress is refusing to allow President Obama to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, a symbol of torture and abuse. Apparently their vote was driven by fears of public backlash if those detained were brought to prisons in the US. Obama had failed to specify exactly what would happen to the prisoners when the […]

A parked car bomb detonated near a popular restaurant in Shula, a poverty-stricken Shiite neighborhood in northwest Baghdad on Wednesday evening , killing 35 persons and wounding 72. It was the deadliest bombing this year. As. Gen. Ray Odierno said recently, it is not going to stop, right? There will be low-intensity violence of this […]

A roadside bomb hit a US convoy 35 miles outside Kabul, killing one American soldier and one civilian, on Wednesday morning. Aljazeera English reports on the arrival of further US troops in Afghanistan: Meanwhile, the State Department foreign service officers are behind the scenes seething at the possibility that Neoconservative Zalmay Khalilzad may attempt to […]

The Obama-Netanyahu talks were clearly a train wreck for Israel’s far rightwing Likud Party. The talks went on nearly twice as long as scheduled, suggesting a lot of bumps in the road. The two seemed to me stiff in their body language afterward, and they clearly did not agree on virtually anything important. Both finessed […]

Kuwait held non-party elections last weekend for its 50-member parliament, electing 21 new faces. The election for the first time of 4 women (out of 16 who ran) and a doubling of the Shiite representation to 9 from 5 have caused a stir among analysts. Likewise, the Salafi or Sunni fundamentalist groups lost substantial ground. […]

Far rightwing Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is meeting Monday with President Barack Obama in Washington. It is the most fateful encounter of two world leaders since Kennedy met Khrushchev. And Obama absolutely must not allow himself to be cowed or misunderstood as timid by Netanyahu, who is a notorious bully and warmonger. (Bill Clinton […]