Juan Cole

Pakistani authorities investigating the aftermath of US bombing raids in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan have come to the conclusion that they cause more harm than good: ‘ Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 […]

A suicide bomber wearing an explosives vest detonated his payload Saturday in the midst of a crowd of Sunni Arab militiamen in Iskandariya south of Baghdad. He killed 9 members of the local Awakening Council or “Sons of Iraq,” and wounded dozens. The Awakening Council members took a salary from the US and subsequently from […]

McClatchy reports that a suicide truck bomber hit a police barricade in the northern city of Mosul on Friday, detonating 200 pounds of explosives just as a US convoy was going by. The explosion killed two Iraqi policemen and 5 US troops, and wounded two other US soldiers. Mosul is the scene of an intense […]

April 9 was the sixth anniversary of the fall of the Saddam Hussein government in Iraq. The date passed without much remark in the United States, which is consumed with its own domestic economic problems and high rates of unemployment, rendering a distant foreign misadventure virtually invisible. Gone are the debates over whether a US […]

Humanities West, a San Francisco cultural institution, is having a program April 17-18 on Napoleon at which I will speak on Napoleon’s Egypt. Media Contact: Genevieve Antaky510/482-3553, gantaky@comcast.net Public Info: Humanities West www. humanitieswest. org Tickets: City Box Office 415/392-4400, www. cityboxoffice. com. (There are still plenty of tickets, so come on down.) HUMANITIES WEST […]

The US will join Germany and United Nations Security Council partners in face to face negotiations with Iran on its nuclear enrichment program. The Bush administration generally stayed away from the talks, on the somewhat bizarre theory that talking directly to the Iranians somehow legitimized them. Note that the Bush administration talked to lots of […]

President Barack Obama made an unscheduled stop in Baghdad on Tuesday, meeting with US troops and also with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Obama told US troops there, ‘ this is going to be a critical period, these next 18 months. I was just discussing this with your commander, but I think it’s something that all […]

The USG Open Source Center translates an interview in a Qatari newspaper with the incoming Sunni Arab governor of the northern Ninevah (Ninawa, Mosul) Province, one of the more violent places in Iraq. He focuses on steps that need to be taken by the Kurdistan leaders to improve relations with Sunni Arabs in the north. […]

President Barack Obama conducted a state visit of the Turkish capital of Ankara on Monday, visiting the mausoleum of the Republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Attaturk and addressing parliament. The Turkish officer corps, which had been declining to attend parliament sessions because of the presence of a pro-Kurdish party, put aside its reservations and attended to […]