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My new Salon.com column is out, entitled McCain runs on Iraq in Michigan. The Intro is here: On the stump in Michigan, John McCain campaigns on victory in Iraq. It’s a risky strategy, as the recent surge in violence shows.’ Read the whole thing.

So the big political news today is that the Iraqi parliament on Saturday finally passed a revision of the “De-baathification” law issued by US viceroy Paul “Jerry” Bremer in May of 2003. That law got tens of thousands of Sunni Arabs fired from their government jobs and excluded from public life and helped kick off […]

My readers sometimes ask me about Arabic software tools for the web. I just wanted to flag for them Yamli.com, which I’m finding a real delight. It would be slow for someone who was a good touch typist in Arabic, but for those of us who peck out the letters, it is wonderful, and it […]

The Bush administration’s assertion that 5 small Iranian boats confronted big, well-armed US ships in the Straits of Hormuz and threatened to blow up the American vessels is looking more and more like a serious error if not a Republican Party fabrication. The episode featured prominently in the Republican presidential debate in South Carolina, according […]

The USG Open Source Center provides translated excerpts from Pakistani editorials reacting to Sunday’s New York Times story on discussions by VP Dick Cheney with others in the administration about widening the role in Pakistan of the Central Intelligence Agency and giving it permission to carry out paramilitary strikes in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas […]

Zogby gave permission to reprint the below, just in: ‘ UTICA, New York—Democrat Barack Obamas dramatic post-Iowa momentum has come to full bloom in the Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby New Hampshire daily tracking poll, rocketing to a 10-point lead over rival Hillary Clinton and a 20-point over Edwards. In New Hampshires Republican primary race, the survey shows Arizonas […]

That the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps coast guard would play chicken with the US Navy is not that surprising. Enemies at sea often taunt one another, and I think there were similar feints by Soviet subs in the old days. (A kind reader pointed out that it even happened more recently with China.) What is […]

A review by Tom Reiss of my book, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East has appeared in The New York Times.

Claire Potter blogged one of my panels at the American Historical Association meeting. (Scroll down). HNN also covered the session (scroll down) and even gives video of myself, Bruce Cumings and Marilyn Young.