Juan Cole

The massive violence in Iraq on Tuesday underlines that in the north, the US is mainly fighting Sunni Iraqis, some of them neo-Baathists. It is a misnomer to call the resistance “al-Qaeda,” since most of them are not foreign fighters but Iraqis, and none of them has Usamah Bin Laden’s telephone number. The recent propaganda […]

AFP reports: ‘ A surge of violence killed 28 people in the past 24 hours in Iraq, among them 12 members of the Kurdish peshmerga forces who died in a bomb blast near the Syrian border, officials said on Monday. The country’s north bore the brunt of the violence, with the attack on the [Kurdish] […]

Fantasizing Democratic Freedoms in Iraq Madhavi Bhasin Associated Press (AP) photographer Bilal Hussein has been held for two year on being suspected of helping Iraqi insurgents, but without being formally charged by the US military. On April 9, 2008 the Iraqi judges dismissed the accusations against him and ordered his release under the Amnesty Law. […]

The intrepid Hannah Allam of the McClatchy news service has more on the visit of Ahmad Chalabi to Sadr City to present his condolences to the slain Sadrist aide Nuri al-Riyadh, killed in Najaf last weekend . Highlights: ‘ Believe what you will about Chalabi being a has-been (or worse); precious few other Iraqi politicians […]

The Iraqi government has discharged 1300 officers, troops and policemen who declined to fight the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr in late March. Most of them had been in Basra and Kut. Although the Iraqi and US governments are trying to spin the dismissals as having to do with laziness or cowardice, it seems obvious […]

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney initially rejected the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report, which advised that Iraq could not be solved militarily and that regional diplomacy and engagement would be necessary. Bush chose instead to pursue an escalation of the war, which he euphemistically called a ‘surge.’ This tactic backfired when Bush inadvertently allowed […]

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that the Shiite holy city of Najaf is under a strict curfew after a drive by shooting that killed Riyad al-Nuri, the head of the Sadr office in that city. Nuri was Muqtada al-Sadr’s brother-in-law, married to one of al-Sadr’s sisters. One of Nuri’s sisters is married to Murtada al-Sadr, the […]

War turns Republics into dictatorships. The logic is actually quite simple. The Constitution says that the Congress is responsible for declaring war. But in 2002 Congress turned that responsibility over to Bush, gutting the constitution and allowing the American Right to start referring to him not as president but as ‘commander in chief’ (that is […]

April 9, yesterday, marked the fifth anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein. But for many Iraqis, it was more notable for marking the beginning of a long-term American military occupation of their country. The US military was so little in control after five years that two mortar shells slammed into the Green Zone, the […]