Juan Cole

Basra Explodes in Shiite Rage Unidentified guerrillas shot down a British Lynx helicopter in Basra on Saturday, killing 5 UK servicemen. The helicopter fell on a house. A large, angry crowd of Shiites gathered to jeer, throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at British troops who arrived at the scene to recover the bodies. The British […]

10 Troops Killed in Afghanistan Crash An American helicopter crashed on Saturday in Afghanistan, killing 10.

Guerrillas Kill 3 GIs 15 Iraqis Dead in Violence Muqtada Emerging as Kingmaker Guerrillas killed 3 GIs in Babil province south of Baghdad on Friday. Friday morning, Five bodies were found in Ramadi. Presumably these are either local Shiites or are Sunni Arabs whom the guerrillas considered to be collaborators with the Shiite-dominated Baghdad government. […]

Hekmatyar goes Al-Qaeda Kabul Bomb Kills Italians Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the radical Islamist guerrilla fighter, has pledged his allegiance to Usamah Bin Laden. Back in the 1980s, Hekmatyar was a “freedom fighter” supported strongly by the Reagan administration. His radical Islamists received on the order of a billion dollars from the CIA to fight the Soviets, […]

Hitchens Affair A little satire on the Hitchens affair. and . . . Sadly no!

Cole/Weisberg Correspondence on Hitchens With Mr. Weisberg’s permission, I am posting our correspondence on the Hitchens hatchet job on me in Slate earlier this week. ======== From: Jacob WeisbergSent: Thu 5/4/2006 6:15 PMTo: Cole, JuanSubject: RE: Forwarded from Weisberg Dear Juan Cole, Thanks for yor message. I certainly know your work and have seen it […]

28 Dead, over 50 Wounded in Bombings, Assassinations Shiites Keep Interior? At least 28 persons were killed in the Iraqi civil war on Thursday. Another big car bomb killed 10 and wounded 50, 15 critically, at a court building in the Shiite slum of Sadr City. In another Very Bad Sign, ‘ In other attacks, […]

Rumsfeld: It Depends on what the Meaning of “Where” Is Back in the Sixties it would be some activist college student who confronted the Secretary of Defense on an illegal, ill-conceived and unwinnable war. It is an index of the changed times that now it is retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern! William Dunham writes, ‘ […]

Hitchens “No Journalist”: Insider A person of long and wide experience with journalism and politics writes an interesting analysis of the Hitchens affair: ‘Hitchens has been in a spiral for a long time, more than a decade, and he threw in with the neocons sometime in the mid-1990s, and with David Irving about that time, […]