Total number of comments: 1542 (since 2013-04-13 18:28:29)
Juan Cole
is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page
Website: http://juancole.com
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Wahhabism is not Sunnism and no one in the Gulf thinks it is. The differences are too numerous to count, from takfir at the drop of a hat, to rejection of the need to follow one of the four madhhabs, to having rejection of innovation be the default regardless of utility. Ibn `Abdu'l-Wahhab threw all the Sunnis out of Islam and Wahhabis excommunicated the head of the faith, the Ottoman sultan. Only once they got rich from oil did Wahhabis begin claiming to be Hanbalis and hence seeking admission to the club. But declaring yourself a Wahhabi in Egypt is still unacceptable, so people with that tendency say they are Salafis, a term they stole from liberal reformers like Muhammad `Abduh.
the saudis got the bad rap 15 years ago, too, when they weren't doing most of those things.
Iran is also guilty of war crimes of some magnitude, in Syria.
Early in the earth's evolution, around 2.3 bn. years ago, cyanobacteria bacteria put oxygen into the atmosphere,creating favorable conditions for evolution of aerobic multi-cellular life forms. So we are number 2.
link to scientificamerican.com
Yes, Hegel was wrong.
Neither Descartes nor Spinoza had anything to do with Luther, whom they would have considered a barbarian fanatic.
If what you mean is that Muslims would benefit from secularization, that is problematic too. Then Uzbekistan would be the shining light of the world.
Muslims are disproportionately rural taken as a whole. That explains the most of it.
What I criticized was not the war but the decision to permanently base thousands of US soldiers in a country that does not want them.
thanks & fixed
Well the Rockefellers and the British upper crust invested in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP) played a big role but arguably did not understand what they were doing. As of the 70s all the upper management of Big Oil, Gas and Coal are culpable, guilty of massive deliberate environmental devastation and of cover-up and fraud.
Oh, no, it is likely to provoke right wing backlash.
Yes, fracking appears to cause earthquakes. But the Mexico quake was ordinary fault activity.
Well I doubt the huge earthquake in Mexico is related to the other phenomena you mention, but it is all dire.
Maybe the Iraqi army ran away not because ISIL was formidable but because there was something wrong with its morale, chain of command, etc.
There are no Shiites to speak of west of the Suez or in Palestine or Jordan. Shiites in Kuwait and UAE are relatively well integrated. So the only Sunni-majority Arab states outside the Fertile Crescent I can think of with Shiite grievances are Saudia and Bahrain. You'd be talking small numbers.
thx! fixed
I do not believer there is a desalinization plant in Gaza. Nor are such plants operated on aquifers.
It isn't only electricity. The aquifer is salinizing, so it is also water. And there is no port or airport for trade or travel. It is the Occupation.
If things had gone a bit differently, you could easily have had a Fukushima in Texas. They dodged a bullet, this time. Nuclear plants are safe until they aren't and then they are cosmically unsafe. Wind turbines don't have that problem.
Al-Assad is a butcher; the reason he is off the hook in Trump admin. is that Russia backed him and the Neo-Fascists track with Russia. Listen to Congress and you get the old story.
Oh, it is all right to be frank. You believe the US is evil. And you let the other Powers off the hook. Putin's hold on Germany via natural gas or neo-colonialism in Ukraine doesn't bother you in the least.
You will find Trump inconsistent on US hegemony. His demand that European allies spend 2% of GDP on military is to make them better cannon fodder in US-initiated wars like Afghanistan.
Yes, I also have solar panels, and am between EV leases. Longer trips, I rent a car. But Bolt/ Tesla 3 should fix that, especially with faster charging
Many thanks, Dale! I agree entirely that free tree plus domestic laissez faire produces inequities!
all good literature is complicated; Pamuk rewards you.
A trillion dollars is 1/18 of the annual GDP of the US, but the Afghans just have it once, if it is that. Nothing to write home about.
The Taliban would never have turned on al-Qaeda, which was their 55th Brigade and with whom they had marriage and other alliances. The Afghan clerics on the other hand did urge that Bin Laden be turned over.
Al-Qaeda was the 55th Brigade of the Taliban and tightly integrated into its military, political and marriage structures.
Bannon didn't actually turn out to be much of an isolationist. Breaking up the Iran deal leads to very possibly to war. And trade war on China has military implications too. You guys bought a crock.
I watch Spanish news and read La Vanguardia and El Pais occasionally. Trump's remarks were reported, as having been falsified. I did not maintain that the Spanish themselves saw a connection between what he said and 1898, I simply asserted that there was one and when that it realized it is rather disgraceful.
The rigging can only be undone if individuals get off their duffs and organize to undo it.
If you are saying that progressive political movements and ideas cannot be propagated, that is ahistorical.
The fog of war is murky. I don't find significant Iranian support for Taliban plausible.
The studies show that overly pessimistic presentation of the realities of climate change produces apathy rather than determination. Tell them what they can do to make things better. Really, the question whether the temperature goes up 3 degrees F or 12 degrees F. The latter is a more chaotic world but it isn't the end and we can still forestall it.
We are talking about Sunni Muslim minorities in Europe, where it is certainly an ethnicity as sociologists define it.
That's not religion, that is ethnic chauvinism. Your argument makes Catholicism a motive for Hitler.
If you posted your reason to Facebook and the police saw it there, yes.
I think it would apply to candidate for president.
The Goldstone invite to the Veselnitskaya meeting is already hundreds of times more substantive than anything in the vague allegations about Hillary's email. False equivalencies reek of propaganda.
No, the Veselnitskaya meeting was not anything like hiring an ex-MI6 guy to do some research. The Veselnitskaya email invite made it clear that Russians close to Putin were offering hacking expertise with a quid pro quo of canceling the Magnitsky Act. Putting forth such a false equivalence is a form of mental spam.
The dollar as the world reserve currency has disadvantages anyway. As for the rest, arbitrageurs already de facto denominate in whatever the most favorable currency for them is.
China is also building solar and wind farms in e.g. Pakistan. It isn't one sided.
Syrian officer corps and high state officials disproportionately Alawi Shiite. However, secular Sunnis tend to side with regime. It isn't about Sunni-Shiite, it is about state clients who benefit and non-clients who are excluded.
Hi, Nel. I am sorry if I was unclear, but I do not believe I said anything at all about the etiology of Trump's sadism; i.e. I did not attribute it to biology.
You raise an important issue with regard to psychological conditions and moral responsibility. But I don't actually think that identifying the mental condition from which a criminal suffers need imply that the criminal is thereby relieved of moral responsibility. Unless someone is truly insane, impulses can be resisted, including criminal impulses. That is a different matter than why someone has impulses or what shapes their particular impulses.
Plastics etc. are not as profitable as gasoline however you dress it up. Dump oil stocks from your portfolio because they are going down.
You are too confident in corporations. Lots of them have failed because they couldn't adapt to changing conditions. I guarantee you everyone in the oil business looks at Tesla 3 and Bolt and the Chinese counterparts and loses it.
All of that is terrible and it appears that Trump loosened the ROE. However, it is a tiny fraction of what the Russian air force has done. Moreover, the US bombing has focused on ISIL whereas the Russians have bombed intensively all around Syria.
link to hrw.org :
"In 2016, Human Rights Watch documented several attacks on homes, medical facilities, markets, and schools that appeared to be targeted, including a major airstrike by the Syrian-Russian coalition that hit al-Quds Hospital and surrounding areas on April 27, 2016, killing 58 civilians and patients. In August alone, there were several attacks on health facilities including in Idlib, Aleppo, Hama, and Homs.
Government forces used at least 13 types of internationally banned cluster munitions in over 400 attacks on opposition-held areas between July 2012 to August 2016, killing and injuring civilians, including children. The Syrian-Russian joint military operations, which began on September 30, 2015, have also extensively used internationally banned cluster munitions...
Government forces, and their allies, also increasingly resorted to the use of incendiary weapons, with at least 18 documented attacks on opposition-held areas in Aleppo and Idlib between June 5 and August 10. In June, Russia Today broadcasted footage of incendiary weapons—specifically RBK-500 ZAB-2.5SM bombs—being mounted on a Russian Su-34 fighter-ground attack aircraft at a Syrian airbase. Incendiary weapons induce a chain of chemical reactions that ignite fires which are hard to extinguish and cause excruciatingly painful burns that are difficult to treat. A total of 113 countries including Russia (but not Syria) have ratified the Convention on Conventional Weapons protocol prohibiting the use of air-delivered incendiary weapons in areas with a "concentration of civilians." "
The Russian bombardment of East Aleppo targeted hospitals and egregiously disregarded civilian safety.
I stand by what I said, which is corroborated by FSA themselves. US role was minor.
I can't tell you how many mistakes you have made in this short comment. First of all, yes, the rebels did take a lot of territory with light arms. That is because in some places they had a lot of popular support and the Syrian army deserted. Some of their medium arms were raided from Baath weapons depots and bases abandoned by isolated soldiers unwilling to fight in what had become enemy territory. Weapons flowed in from Iraq. The Gulf and Turkey bought them weapons. For much of the war, the US CIA listening posts along the Turkish border actively attempted to stop the latter two from giving heavy weapons to the rebels, in part because the US feared they would end up being used against Israel. The Russian investment in Syria has been orders of magnitude more than that of the US, and the Russians are responsible for tens of thousands more deaths than the US.
Soviet military spending in the 1980s was flat; Afghanistan was minor for them.
geez, that was a satire; I know it is hard a keep a sense of humor in these dark times, but let's try
That story is an old wives tale.
The moisture in the soil under the sphinx has for thousands of years seeped up into the stone through a salty layer and this process erodes the stone, hence the nose falling off. Bonaparte brought along scientists and they were very keen to record, not destroy the antiquities. Ordinary soldiers, sometimes inconvenienced by the scientists, took to calling their donkeys "M. Scientist."
authoritarian countries are often low-crime. If you spy intensively on everyone, it is harder to commit certain kinds of crime. Embezzlement is still big, apparently.
The US is not in Saudi Arabia
I disagree. The Neo-Nazi, KKK, white supremacist and many biker gangs are very dangerous and if Trump, who is already cultivating them, sics them on people it could be a bloodbath.
thanks, Nicholas. Actually I am finding really good fares on Qatar Air these days.
The chemical weapons were supplied by German firms. George Schultz at State complained bitterly in 1983 about Iraq use of chem. Reagan was less bothered, but you are mixing together indiscriminately things that are not connected. And by the way, Russian support continued for Saddam despite chem use as well.
Of course Saddam could have genocided the Kurds. He had lots of *Russian* tanks and artillery, which is what the US no fly zone stopped.
I have written myself blue in the face about what the US has done to Afghanistan and Iraq. But your sort of undifferentiated anti-Americanism is just uninformed. Milosevic would have genocided the Kosovars without the US, and Saddam would have genocided the Kurds without the no-fly zone. You are not worried about what the Russians did to Afghanistan or the way they propped up the Baath and daffy Gaddafi, or the bloodbath Putin imposed on Syria in the past two years. And you discount the American crusade against malaria and other debilitating diseases, which has improved the lives of millions. I'll make a bet with you that you have never read even one thick tome on modern American foreign policy written out of actual archives.
Some uses of American power have been bad. Others have been good. Europe would have been Nazi for decades without the US. I am not sure why it is so hard for people to be balanced on this matter.
thanks for your comment, Don. Hizmet is not transparent about virtually anything--organization, leadership, money, etc, hence shadowy. It clearly infiltrated key Turkish institutions and recorded individuals, which is creepy behavior. I define cults as religious movements that demand high degrees of obedience and secretly engage in deviant behavior.
Environmentalists have to prioritize. Nothing is as bad as carbon dioxide emissions. Nothing. PV panels have valuable material in them and large scale recycling will come. But you can't get back a third of the earth's land mass that will go under water if you go on burning fossil fuels.
The bill was much, much larger before the solar panels.
The argument is that Russian hackers, trolls, alt-right media and useful idiots in social media suppressed Democratic vote in key usually blue states. The popular vote depends on big states like NY and Cali, and is not relevant to the argument. The theory may be incorrect but you can't refute it this way.
All for liberal arts, obviously, but I doubt your observations would stand up to statistical reality. Last I knew, the US produced 10 lawyers for every engineer. We have a crisis in finding school math teachers. Americans aren't doing enough science.
with due respect, I did say that Pew conducted the poll, and put in a hyperlink so that you can go to their page. Page 2 gives the methodology you asked about.
And the exclusion of Somalis, Libyans etc.? It isn't just Iran; and alliance with Putin is tacitly an alliance with Iran.
All Dutch trains now run 100% on electricity generated by wind.
link to businessinsider.com
It was a historical comment. Nowadays Muslims in Poland have dwindled but at one point they were not insignificant.
Kick off insurance, 22 million. Kill dead for sure, 22,000.
The Volt was an advance. The Bolt is better
a) most electricity is not generated by petroleum but by coal and natural gas; Germans have plenty of coal but they understand it has to be phased out. b) German households' monthly power bills are significantly less than the US. They pay a higher rate for electricity, but German efficiency in appliances, insulation etc. is much higher; c) if you figure in the health and climate costs of coal, it isn't 5 cents a kilowatt hour, it is more like 80 cents/ KWh. You get what you pay for.
link to energytransition.org
Oh, I think greed and stupidity cover it.
There is right anarchism (Libertarianism) and left anarchism (syndicalism).
After Libya went bad, the US position has been that Assad should go but that the Syrian government should not be overthrown. Under Trump it isn't even clear that the position is any longer that Assad must go.
The idea that the US is trying to install al-Qaeda in Damascus is looney toons.
Try diagramming your submission. You have not said anything, but have implied some propaganda. I would not normally even bother with it but it is a reply.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Assad provoked the Civil War to stay in power and is one of the great monsters of the young twenty-first century.
The Syrian government was not elected. Police states often stage spectacles of coerced acclamation they call elections. Syria lost its seat at the UN and is not legitimate.
Petroleum, Red Sea, Suez
Nusra doesn't know how to run the factory and the gas attacks have been sarin, not chlorine.
Assad would not be insane to launch chem attacks. He has been doing small ones here an there all along when his troops got in trouble. It is strategic and makes perfect sense (however morally vile and illegal it is) for a small army trying to level the playing field. Saddam did it at the Iranian front. Also in that war, there were regime apologists who tried to blame Iran itself, which is ridiculous. I'm not saying you are an apologist; but there are Baath apologists being paid to muddy the waters and you are falling for fake news. All of the chem attacks in Syria have occurred in rebel-held territory. Are they gassing themselves? The people giving them shelter? It is ridiculous. Plus they don't have the technical expertise to do it, whereas the regime is known to retain stockpiles.
Am a huge fan of Sy Hersh; on this we disagree. I have given my reasons several times.
Even with fracking, it is unlikely that petroleum could meet world demand in 2050 if there were not EVs or renewables. Since there are, we won't ever find out.
I put solar panels on my house and ran my EV off them. All non carbon.
Most scientists who have crunched the numbers on biomass are skeptical. Basically they make food expensive for the poor.
apparently 25% or so
You're not paying attention. Norway jiggered things so it is. cheaper to trade in old vehicle for ev. Also India is on verge of doubling fleet & Norway type policy can ensure people want evs.
All you have to know is that Fahrenheit is *more*. So 2 degrees C. is 3.6 degrees F. When they talk about going up to 5 degrees C. above the 1780 base, they are talking about something truly apocalyptic (remember it is a global surface temperature average and the oceans are cold.
Trump is heavily tied to Big Oil.
there are technical breakthroughs in PV everyday at universities and research labs around the country and around the world. That is why projections to 2040 or 2050 are so unreliable. Solar power will come much faster than anyone realizes.
Lots of places to go. But unlikely they could survive financially. They don't take in a lot of advertising, and you have to get a slot on the satellite networks; some are Egypt-controlled.
Saudi Arabia sent troops into Bahrain to put down the youth reform movement of 2011. The US mildly deplored it.
Qatar's citizen population is 300,000. Saudi's is around 30 million.
yeah the picture is more mixed than that
Al-Maliki is Da'wa and has never had particularly close relations to Iran. If they are now backing him, it is ad hoc. But their favorites are other parties.
No. Note close.
Actually that is mentioned.
First of all, I lived many years in less developed economies, and people who come to the West from them are delighted to have escaped from squalor and crime. There is a fairly well established correlation, moreover, although it is not absolute, between higher-income societies and the ability to keep democracy going. People living in the areas where I spent much of my life do not have democracy or any prospect of it. The point I was making is that 99.9999% of immigrants do not want to undermine the very things for which they undertook the wrenching journey from their less fortunate homelands to achieve. It is not relevant, by the way, where democracy developed or how, only where it is now being practiced, however imperfectly. And to tell you the truth, rule of law and application of the law equally to all citizens is just as important. 19th century Middle Eastern reformers were astonished at the idea and immediately saw it as the key to a better system. Not everything is the same everywhere.
There is a lot of Islamophobia in the Conservative Party
Russian military spending is 4.9% of GDP
US DoD budget is 3.3% of GDP
link to data.worldbank.org
Hi, Richard. You are arguing this on too exalted a plane. Google 'spirit cooking' and 'pizzagate.' And Benghazi. The argument is not that lots of people read Sputnik. It is that Breitbart and Alex Jones etc. picked up anti-Hillary articles from outlets like that and then broadcast it to millions inside the US.
You're leaving out Sputnik, coverage of hacked emails, and the Breitbart etc echo chamber
Millions who can afford them and would save money if they got them are not buying them