Juan Cole

Cobban on Hitchens Helena Cobban is one of our great foreign affairs journalists. She has covered the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere for many years and is herself an accomplished Arabist. Those interested in the Middle East or world affairs who are not reading Just World News daily are depriving themselves of one of the […]

Hitchens not Drunk, Only an Asinine Thief I’m told Andrew Sullivan is saying that he was at Hitchens’s house when Hitchens stole my private mail and published it without my permission, and that he was sober, and that I owe Hitchens an apology. I am very sorry to hear this. Hitchens came drunk to my […]

British To Withdraw from Maysan, Muthanna Dozens Killed The British are obviously declaring victory in southern Iraq and going home. They are in the process of handing over security to local provincial governments in Maysan and Muthanna, and heading out. Soon the Italians will do the same in Nasiriyah. Does Diwaniyah desperately need foreign troops? […]

Hitchens the Hacker; And, Hitchens the Orientalist And, “We don’t Want Your Stinking War! Christopher Hitchens owes me a big apology. I belong to a private email discussion group called Gulf2000. It has academics, journalists and policy makers on it. It has a strict rule that messages appearing there will not be forwarded off the […]

Biden Plan on Iraq As some readers suggested, the Biden/Gelb op-ed in the Washington Post on Iraq was much compressed. More details are available in a recent Biden speech, which actually addresses some of the concerns I expressed about the op-ed. Biden speech on Iraq. As I say, you have to admire Biden for recognizing […]

More on Autonomous Regions Senator Biden and Leslie Gelb propose a Bosnia solution for Iraq. That is, a very loose federation of three big ethnic enclaves. They seem to just surrender Kirkuk province to Kurdistan and don’t seem aware of the Turkoman population as a factor there. There are on the order of 750,000 Turkomans, […]

The Israel Lobby And a Reply to Drezner Philip Weiss weighs in on the Mearsheimer and Walt paper on the Israel lobby at The Nation. It is a fine, searching, level-headed treatment. The big surprise: The influence of Leon Uris on American political science! Thanks to bloggers, by the way, for taking up the issue […]

Settling Iraq before it Blows Up A renewed debate on the possible partition of Iraq is emerging. Let’s get one thing out of the way. As for letting a civil war rage, deliberately, I don’t understand. Everyone is (rightly) complaining about world inaction on the genocide in the Sudan. But here you want to provoke […]

Racial McCarthyism on the Right The petition I set up to defend John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt from scurrilous charges of anti-Semitism (which is to say, racism) for daring write an academic paper on the Israel lobby, is percolating along, accumulating signatures from post-secondary teachers, as I had hoped. Academics from all over the country […]