Iraq

The GOP senators have their own foreign policy, and it isn’t the same as that of President Obama or Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. For them, the US is a 900 pound behemoth that can boss the world around with its high-tech military at will. Their foreign policy is to shoot first and ask questions […]

Iraq War

New Pope has Opportunity to Improve Christian-Muslim Relations

Juan Cole

Pope Benedict XVI’s suprise announcement on Monday that he plans to resign at the end of this month marks a potential generational change in the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. His successor has an opportunity to revive the breakthroughs of the Second Vatican Council in promoting inter-religious dialogue, and repairing the Church’s troubled relationship […]

Arab Spring

Will a declining America Start Having to Obey the same Rules as Everybody Else? (Chomsky)

Juan Cole

Noam Chomsky writes at Tomdispatch.com: [This piece is adapted from “Uprisings,” a chapter in Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire, Noam Chomsky’s new interview book with David Barsamian (with thanks to the publisher, Metropolitan Books). The questions are Barsamian’s, the answers Chomsky’s.] Does the United States still […]

Iran

Chuck Hagel Mauled in Bizarro World of US Senate

Juan Cole

The confirmation hearing in the Senate for Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, was painful to watch because it displayed the tomfoolery, pretense, self-righteous know-nothingism, and embarrassing lack of contact with reality that dominate the landscape of America’s broken democracy. It was like watching a Nebraska ordinary Joe set upon by circus […]

Iraq

Iraq in Crisis as Troops Shoot Down unarmed 6 Sunni Protesters

Juan Cole

Sunni Arab tribes in Falluja (presumably branches of Dulaim) on Saturday demanded that the government turn over to them within 7 days the troops who fired on protesters on the outskirts of the western city of Falluja, killing 6 and wounding 19 on Friday. Otherwise, they say, they will declare jihad on government troops. The […]

Afghanistan

How Torture Misled the US into an Illegal War: What Zero Dark Thirty Really Leaves Out

Juan Cole

An important problem with the narrative line of “Zero Dark Thirty,” Kathryn Bigelow’s film about the Central Intelligence Agency’s quest for Usama Bin Laden, is not just that it comes across as pro-torture but that it ignores the elephant in the room: Bad intelligence elicited by torture almost derailed that quest to put down al-Qaeda […]

Egypt

Christmas 2012: The Flowering of Middle Eastern Christianity and the Challenges it Faces

Juan Cole

There are more Middle Eastern Christians than ever before, and they are poised between emergence as a new political force in a democratizing region and the dangers to them of fundamentalism and political repression. The arguments you see for Christian decline in the region are mostly wrong. If we count the Christians in the Arab […]

Iraq War

Psy of “Gangnam Style” attacked Bush’s Iraq War, not America

Juan Cole

Korean pop star Psy (Park Jae-sang ) is apologizing for performances in 2004 in which he condemned the Iraq War. At one point he sang another songwriter’s lyrics about US soldiers killing and torturing Iraqis and the need to fight back against them and their family members. This is the purported video of Psy, protesting […]

Energy

The Tesla S and World Peace: Can American Green Energy End the Gulf Oil Wars?

Juan Cole

Petroleum makes the world go round, with 70% of it used to power automobiles. About a fifth of the world’s 90 million barrels a day of oil production comes out of the Persian Gulf/ Arabian Gulf. A large part of the US stand-off with Iran has to do with petroleum. The US doesn’t want a […]