Juan Cole

Riverbend is Back Riverbend weighs in on the condition of Iraq and Saddam’s impending execution. I disagree with her about Jalal Talabani (the old-time Kurdish politician who is now Iraq’s president), who has opposed the death penalty all his political life, and I think that he genuinely won’t sign the death decree for reasons of […]

Alexandrovna Guest Op-Ed: Saddam’s Execution and the Campaign Against Iran Saddam’s Execution is about Iran Larisa Alexandrovna ‘PROLOGUE: When someone does something obviously egregious, we tend to look past it because it is our nature to believe that people are naturally sane, good, and honest. We cannot imagine that anyone would willfully destroy their own […]

Guerrillas Kill 5 GIs Security Alert over Saddam Sentence Al-Aamiri killing Roils Shiite Politics The US military announced that Iraqi guerrillas killed 5 GIs on Thursday in separate incidents. All but one attack clearly occurred in Sunni Arab areas. One was in the east of Baghdad, but since there are Sunni Arab districts between the […]

Thousands Demonstrate in Najaf; Sunnis Clash with Gov’t in Baghdad over Saddam Sentence; Ford blasts W., Cheney on Iraq Iraqi guerrillas killed three US GIs on Wednesday in two separate bombings. Thousands of protesters came out into the streets in the holy Shiite city of Najaf on Wednesday, protesting the killing by US troops of […]

Polk Guest Editorial: Pros and Cons of ISG The Baker-Hamilton Study: Pluses and Minuses William R. Polk ‘In recent days, as you know, there has been a great deal of publicity on the Baker-Hamilton plan for dealing with the problems the United States faces in Iraq and for restarting the peace process on the Palestine […]

Guerrillas Kill 7 GIs, blow up 52 Iraqis AFP rounds up the violence in Iraq on Tuesday. 7 more US GIs were killed, and bombings in Baghdad and Kirkuk killed and wounded scores. Fighting broke out between US troops and Mahdi Army militiamen in East Baghdad. Emily Miller’s op-ed on her brother in Iraq is […]

Ford and Foreign Policy: Snapshots from the 1970s Former President Gerald Ford has died at 93. A Wolverine star of the early 1930s at the University of Michigan, Ford passed up an opportunity to play for the Detroit Lions in the new NFL, going instead to law school. He was Richard Nixon’s vice president during […]

Top Ten Myths about Iraq 2006 1. Myth number one is that the United States “can still win” in Iraq. Of course, the truth of this statement, frequently still made by William Kristol and other Neoconservatives, depends on what “winning” means. But if it means the establishment of a stable, pro-American, anti-Iranian government with an […]

Shiite Militias and Iran in Iraq Another US soldier was killed on Christmas Day, bringing the number of GIs killed in Iraq to one more than the number of persons killed in the 9/11 attacks. AP reports that the British raided a police HQ and prison in Basra when they heard that the unit was […]