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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Susan Rice sees the Baath Regime in Syria through a human rights lens. The Obama administration had reached out to Bashar until he started massacring protesters.
They have some oil fields in Syria (and actually sell oil to the Syrian government they are trying to overthrow). They also are trying for the refinery at Baiji (raw crude isn't very valuable and isn't usually smuggled but gasoline is gold).
I have a Volt plus 16 solar panels. My utility is sending *me* checks every month and most of my fuel is from the sun so I don't go very often to a gas station and send my money overseas. The savings are paying for the car and the panels over time, so they're actually free. I've saved 2 tons of CO2 since December.
aw shucks... thanks!
astaghfiru'llah! khaili mamnun!
those statistics are vastly exaggerated. Liz Sly looked into it. Sunni Arab-Kurdish unions common
Intermarriage was never more than 2%
Kurdish is no more distant from English than Russian is. Indo-European is a big Eurasian language family.
oh come on, the recognize same prophet, same holy book
I think the US backed Allawi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phzRY0DdRXk
It was the Russians moving intp Manchuria that caused Japan to surrender
Yes, but Mark, the US lost the Vietnam War.
https://www.juancole.com/feed/subscription
I admire Mr Sullivan, who I have always found to be an honest man. There's nothing wrong with having been wrong and then admitting it and it is not hypocritical but a sign of growth.
Or they were Shiite troops who felt stranded and alien up there.
If you are not a trained jurist you have to obey the rulings given you by the Source for Emulation you choose. It would be like arguing with a physicist about quantum mechanics, from an Usuli point of view.
Saudis are very influential. But their sovereign wealth fund is $750 bn & their currency reserves similar. US is a $16 trillion a year economy, so Saudia is small potatoes. But they are very influential in DC; not an an AIPAC scale, though.
US policy has been in favor of a united Iraq on the whole, Mr Biden excepted.
There is religious identity and linguistic identity. One overlaps, the other doesn't (though Kurdish Sunnism is also distinctive-- much more Sufi than most Sunni Arabs).
Sara, "Irak" was a geographical term, not a country. There was an "Arab Iraq" and a "Persian Iraq" (Isfahan was in latter). You are projecting contemporary understandings back onto medieval history. In the 11th century you are likely talking about the Buwayhid state ruled by Iranians that stretched from Khurasan to Baghdad. There was no country of Iraq and Mosul wasn't in it. As for Arab Iraq, it is like Provencal or Catalonia (or Palestine).
a majority of the Democrats in the House of Representatives voted against the Iraq War.
Iraq hasn't always existed as a political unit so nothing can always have been part of it. Mosul has belonged to lots of polities in the past.
Watch Rachel Maddow!
Oh, I am confident that when the public becomes sufficiently exercised, they shall change their condition. They often have a slow burn of decades. In the meantime, we can at least analyze and point out the shell games to those with eyes to see.
Jerry Brown successfully got people to vote to raise taxes for education in California last year. You're being too cynical.
saw it? I was partly behind it!
but upper admin salaries are miniscule compared to state cuts of university budgets over past 30 yrs
that is completely unfair w/ regard to state universities, which have been drastically cut by state legislators
you mean Iran and Russia
People often convert in captivity, as an extension of Stockholm syndrome. Look up John McCain. There is no shame in being weak in the face of powerful captors.
thanks so much, Craig, for your informed comment!
Good point. They were former high officials of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It doesn't even make any sense to call them "terrorists" since they were state actors.
Oh, come on. The Interior Minister of the Taliban regime? The worst. Knowing that somebody bears responsibility for deaths and proving it in court are not the same thing. Is a government in power putting down an insurrection a massacre? It is a prosecutor's nightmare.
The Haqqani group, which held Sgt. Bergdahl, is on the terrorism watch list.
If solar is being used to power industries, well they mostly work during the day. And rural households go to bed early & don't use much energy at night.
Joined the union!
Hi, Sherifa. Well I was glued to Egy sat. t.v. in Arabic, which is not exactly anti-regime, and they kept saying the youth didn't vote. They were lamenting it. This is plausible because they didn't vote for the constitution either. Egyptian media also lamented low turnout, and the extension to a third day was obviously a manifestation of that lack of turnout. Sabahi got about 20% of the vote in May 2012 when I was there and took Alexandria away from the Salafis, attracting big middle class and union constituencies as well as many Delta villagers. The reason he didn't do well this time is that this wasn't a real election and everybody knew it. It was an authoritarian plebiscite, with youth protesters serving years of hard labor, NGO offices trashed by thugs, heavy media self-censorship, etc., etc. I know you taught al-Sisi and maybe he was a nice young man then, but he has become a sadist and a narcissist and nobody likes those things for very long. Please do also watch your language; it is a family blog.
Oh, I think Obama is worried about a small US force being caught in the middle of renewed Afghanistan conflict, which is why he is phasing the whole thing out at end of 2016.
Thanks for clear and informed comments!
yeah but it is demonstrably harder to kill people, especially a lot of people, with those kinds of weapons than with semi-automatic guns, so British murder rate is lower than US. Lower suicide rate by a third also suggests ease of offing oneself encourages suicide by firearm here.
Britain is not several times more violent than the US. These assertions are distortions on the basis of the different ways the UK reports crimes. It has a lower murder rate, lower suicide rate, etc
Oh then it is a matter of diction. it would have been helpful for you to more clearly frame the remark as a Faux pov not your own. We can't read minds out here in cyberspace. sorry for the misreading.
If the Pakistani Muslim League government bombing Taliban with airplanes isn't a war on extremism by a Muslim government, then I don't know what would be.
Saying that Muslims never condemn their own compatriots' extremism is what is vitriolic. That's a blanket statement of the sort that is always incorrect, and in this case grossly incorrect on the facts. Such assertions are Islamophobic. I'm not sure what form of such condemnation would not have power implications in society so it is always going to be imbricated in a power struggle. Power is capillary.
The atrocities of Boko Haram have been universally condemned by Muslim authorities, including the leading one, Al-Azhar seminary in Cairo. Moreover, the newspapers and social media all over the Muslim world have been just as full of horror and outrage at Boko Haram as have the Western ones. The Faux News charge ultimately cannot be answered in the US because you lot don't know enough about the Muslim world to recognize the condemnations or to calibrate their importance, and maybe you don't care to do the little research that would show you how foolish and ignorant your last few sentences are.
It is also possible that you are just trolling.
Gulf Cooperation Council.
Persian is related to English.
The asides were not political but it is fascinating that you see them that way.
Dear Davut: I'm assuming your question is sincere and not a form of trolling. Your allegation that Egypt has killed more than Gaddafi had is incorrect and makes me suspicious of the motives of your question.
I have several criteria for international (not Western) intervention. One is a very severe humanitarian crisis (Egypt despite the crackdown of the past 9 months does not fit the bill; Syria does, with some 160,000 dead. Libya did because of the tanks rolling toward Benghazi with murder on their minds). Another is whether the UN Security Council has authorized an intervention. Another is whether an intervention is practicable (you can't stop alleyway hand to hand fighting from 30,000 feet). Another is whether an intervention could be reasonably foreseen by a prudent person to cause more trouble than it is worth.
Libya met and meets all my criteria. Syria only one and therefore I'm opposed. Egypt none at all.
I'm not interested in debating pure pacifists or Westphalians (apparently) who are against all intervention of all kinds anywhere and any time.
Such people in any case never complain about this sort of thing:
http://www.irinnews.org/report/97194/south-africa-bolsters-its-troops-in-the-central-african-republic
The Iraq intervention was illegal and responded to no humanitarian crisis; the Libyan was legal and urgent
The whole thing was indeed remarkably inefficient. Many sorties were flown without any bombs being dropped, and in other instances relatively minor targets were hit. By late July many planes were running out of munitions. But it is also true that Gaddafi had a lot of arms depots and a lot of tanks menacing innocent villagers. Your statistics don't challenge my point, which is that in Misrata and many other close siege situations it wasn't NATO but local pluck that won the day, against overwhelming Gaddafist military superiority. If he had been able to fly planes and helicopter gunships (as al-Assad is doing in Syria), the massacre of innocents would have been awful. As for NATO, the death toll from its actions of non-combatants appears to have been very small, though all life is precious.
The Libyan revolution was almost entirely fought by ordinary people on the ground. Look into the Gaddafis' siege of Misrata for 6 months, where locals got almost no UN/ NATO help. NATO mainly bombed some regime arms depots and a few armored convoys. If the people hadn't fought, that would have been useless. It seems entirely possible that the revolutionaries would have won over time even if the UN had not intervened, which the UN was right to do. But it would have taken years, destroyed all the cities, and driven everyone into the arms of al-Qaeda, as happened in Syria. I don't know of any crimes committed by UN forces in Libya. Human Rights Watch has asked questions about cases of 100 civilians killed in the course of the air campaign.
Which I stand by. However, that Ansar al-Shariah is *extremist* is not in doubt and nothing I said then disputed that. I was talking about operational links with core al-Qaeda.
Marxism is really in trouble when it prefers Neoliberal oil mafias like the Gaddafis to popular revolution.
Ansar al-Sharia was not freedom fighters in 2011! As for being extremists, they are practically al-Qaeda.
didn't give out any visas; near CIA safe house with 40 guys...
Si
It hasn't been proven he was directly behind the killings, though Human Rights Watch has suggested it.
Oh come on. Penguin voluntarily removed a book from the Indian market? That's your story? They knew Hindutva judges would rule against them. BJP infiltrates RSS types into the bureaucracy as a way of remaining in power even when they aren't. We are likely headed toward the end of freedom of speech in India as regards archeology, linguistics and history-- which you cannot separate out from science.
Why would BJP risk nuclear war twice in 2002 over a terrorist attack (not the attack of a state) if they were sane people? If you don't think that affected foreign investment for a while, you didn't live through it.
I am afraid you don't read texts very well. The BJP government was belligerent and willing to go to war, as the article's headline said, despite the danger of nuclear weapons exchange. There is no evidence that the Musharraf government itself was behind the attack on the parliament building.
yeah this was real good for business
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/the-danger-is-that-india-and-pakistan-think-they-could-survive-a-nuclear-war-606304.html
comments from angry people of various sorts have been with me since I started blogging. At first they were angry I said al-Qaeda was a lunatic fringe, not characteristic of Muslims. Then they were angry I said Iraq War was a disaster. Recently racists angry about being called racists. Life on the internet.
likely too much of one chemical in the brain and not enough of another
(By Juan Cole) is my byline - otherwise I just posted it; but will work on clarifying that & thanks for the comment
Because it is a crazy idea?
actually 80% of Syria's poison gas stocks have been destroyed
78 percent of Alabamans are White Southerners, and they like it like that. Alabamans are small minorities everywhere in the world except Alabama. When white southerners visit Alabama, they enjoy being in a place that’s mostly white southerners. They feel a part of the solidarity that exists amongst Alabamans. They say, “we built this country and we’ll fight for it.”.
You do understand that the US was intimately involved in some of that litany, as will running interference for Saddam at the UN over his use of chemical weapons? A hard policy, to encourage a war on Iran that involved atrocities and to ally on that basis, and then to later use that as a basis for invasion of the former ally.
Yeah, well if we substitute the Bible for the Constitution, then the non-Christians are in big trouble, which Moore well knows and it is what he is angling for.
Oh, that's ridiculous. All the bigger embassy bombings were spun by the incumbent admin for political purposes, especially Beirut. But by the way there is no, zero evidence that the Obama folks departed from Intel briefings in what they briefed. Hadeel Shalchi was in Benghazi that day and she saw anti-film demos. No innocent camera people were put in jail by Obama. Sheesh.
The families of many Palestinian refugees in Gaza had lived in Sderot for millennia and were kicked out of their homes in 1948 without being paid a cent in reparations for their property. Many still live in refugee camps. They could walk home in an hour if allowed to return.
The question is treatment of non-combatants, which cannot be sidestepped by making it appear as though all Palestinians are mindlessly violent. Shooting civilians, including children, in a systematic way by an Occupying Power is a war crime.
As for the combatants, what would you do if gangs came to your house, kicked you and your family out of it, chased you penniless onto a narrow strip of land and then besieged your family again, leaving your kids half-starved? 70% of Gaza residents were chased out of southern Israel. I don't approve of violence, but I know what Israelis would do in similar circumstances.
I know all that. But the PA elections do in fact return majorities for Fateh or Hamas and other elements of the PLO also do run, and people know who belongs to what-- otherwise why punish Fateh in 2006? I think the electoral history challenges the idea that Palestinian politicians don't represent anyone.
Israel has not recognized any Palestinian state and Mr. Netanyahu says they are not yet ready for one.
Israel and the squatters on the West Bank routinely expropriate Palestinian land and resources in a violent and aggressive manner and frequently use aerial bombings and other tactics that do not discriminate as to non-combatants.
All the elections held in Palestine have returned either the PLO or Hamas to power, so I can't agree about unrepresentativeness.
the Guardian destroyed nothing; police came to their offices and smashed hard drives
The Guardian also reported on the gov't demands, which NYT did not
I am telling you that my solar panels and EV are saving me money. Now!
Semiotics teaches us that signs are arbitrary.
Asmara is a mile and a half up and you have to have big lungs; I kept fainting when I first arrived.
Oh, come on. Obama sent them in, when many of his advisers were against it. It was a big risk and could have gone badly wrong.
It's what al-Nashra said. However, the thrust to the reporting on all this is that substantially fewer permits were granted this year. A claim of none is easily refuted by "1", but that wouldn't challenge the point.
I cited Bolling's question, not Paul's answer.
that was a satire, not a real story.
And, since half the 2.4 million people in America's prison gulag are African-American, the idea that they are being treated with kid gloves is ridiculous.
hi, John! thx!
all nationalism, including Israeli and Italian, is recent; peoples are older, and there were people in the 19th century who thought of themselves as from Palestine when there were no people who thought of themselves as from Israel.
You're leaving out the Oklahoma City bombing and lots of shooting incidents connected to the American Militia movement.
W. has helped build houses in Africa and does a fair amount of charitable work.
I think there's more to fascism than just state-capitalist cooperation.
Sorry, Bruce. That the US would go to war to stop oil from being denominated in Euros is not plausible. For one thing, when the Euro is higher than the dollar, oil is already largely denominated in Euros; oil traders aren't stupid. The theory makes no sense.
lots of smartphone, tablet VPN apps
VPN
igneous rock absorbs CO2; see THE LONG THAW cited below
it is 4-5 degrees Celsius and the answer to all your questions is yes.
http://www.amazon.com/Long-Thaw-Changing-Climate-Essentials-ebook/dp/B004EYT8FG/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1396738652&sr=1-1&keywords=the+long++thaw+and+climate
It was Mujahidin. some were bought up by Kuwait. Afghans didn't have technology to keep them up. Syria isn't Afghanistan
Look for barrel bomb in blog search engine
Oh, come on. Everyone knows Walmart offloads employee costs (food insecurity, health care) onto government. Maryland even passed a law targeting only Walmart among corporations insisting that it cannot do that. The filing admits that changes in SNAP could affect their bottom line, implying that it would have a negative impact on their employees.
http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=juancole/ymbn&loc=en_US
Wonderful comment, Farhang.
The only slight caveat is that Wikileaks shows that Saudis were urging US to hit Natanz with cruise missiles even while they were inviting Ahmadinejad to Riyadh
So what? I was there in June and *no one* was talking about or asking for a military intervention. It wasn't what the protest movement was about. That one kid personally liked the idea is totally irrelevant.
No one in Tamarrud asked for military intervention. They demanded Morsi accept a recall election
Surveilling land mail (in the sense of opening it) on any kind of scale would be illegal and would cause them a lot of trouble. I doubt they'd risk it lightly. It is only because the law on electronic comms is up in the air that they went whole hog on it.
the text inside the envelope is not surveilled; they do scan the addresses.
My advice, contact Sunventrix and they'll tell you.
The solar panels pay for themselves faster if coupled with an EV.