Those who suggest that the United States as a superpower is weaker in the Middle East today than nine years ago overestimate the impact on the region of the Bush administration’s frenetic invasions and occupations. Iraq and Afghanistan were off in corners of the Middle East, and the US clearly got bogged down in them […]
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Juan Cole
Top Ten Middle East Stories 2013: How the Region has Changed
(By Juan Cole) 10. Tunisia suffered the assassination of two leftist politicians, provoking demonstrations bigger than the ones that brought down the government of dictator Zine El Abidin Ben Ali in 2011. The second of these assassinations, this summer, provoked students, youth activists and the major national labor union to mount concerted demonstrations demanding that […]
Assange warns of Information Apartheid & Encompassing State: “This is the Last Free Generation”
(By Juan Cole) Wired notes that Wikileaks activist Julian Assange addressed the Chaos Communication Congress by Skype Sunday. Assange said, “This is the last free generation… The coming together of the systems of government and the information apartheid is such that none of us will be able to escape it in just a decade.” . […]
Benghazi Consular attack was Local, not al-Qaeda: NYT Correspondent Demolishes GOP Talking Points
(By Juan Cole) David D. Kirkpatrick at the New York Times has settled the controversy over events in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, by actually going to Benghazi and digging into the story. Admittedly, it was a somewhat dangerous assignment, but Kirkpatrick risked it. The take-away of this careful investigation, depending on a range of […]
Syria spills over on Lebanon: Beirut Bombing Kills Sunni Critic of Syria’s al-Assad
(By Juan Cole) Respected Lebanese politician and former ambassador to the United States, Muhammad Shatah, was assassinated by a massive car bomb near the parliament building on Friday. He was on his way to a meeting of the Future Party. He was an adviser to former prime minister Saad Hariri of Future, whose own father […]
US Arms Shiite Iraqi Gov’t to Kill Sunni Rebels, Arms Syrian Sunni Rebels to overthrow Shiite Gov’t
(By Juan Cole) It can only be called an Escherian Mobius Strip foreign policy. The Obama administration is sending hellfire missiles and surveillance drones to the Shiite Islamic Mission Party-dominated government of Iraq to help in the latter’s struggle against radical Sunni rebels who have increased their bombings and attacks this year. If the helicopter […]
Snowden’s Christmas Message on Privacy: Does NSA threaten 9th, 14th Amendments, ‘Inviolate Personality’?
(By Juan Cole) Edward Snowden’s Christmas address, carried by the British Channel 4, concentrated on the disappearance of privacy. He said that a child born today might “never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought.” People walk around with a tracking device in their pockets, he noted, […]
Egyptian Junta designates Muslim Brotherhood as “Terrorist Organization” in Attempt to Crush Dissent
(By Juan Cole) In Egypt, the interim appointed government of Prime Minister Hazem Biblawi, backed by the military junta that made the coup of July 3, on Wednesday formally categorized the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. The decree was published by the feared Interior Ministry (kind of like US FBI but with torture) on […]
Birth of Hope: Top Ten Solar Energy Stories 2013
(By Juan Cole) The story of a doomed race who need to be saved by a messiah is on people’s minds today. It functions at a spiritual level. There is an analogous story at the physical level. Humankind is facing the biggest crisis in its 120,000-year-long existence, the physical equivalent of original sin. It is […]