Juan Cole

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 […]

Defending Bloggers from SLAPs It was bound to happen. “Blogger hit with Multi-Million Dollar Lawsuit.” Props to MBA for trying to help.

Guerrillas Kill 25 Sistani supports Gradual US Withdrawal Bombings and assassinations left some 25 persons dead in Iraq on Saturday, including 17 who just showed up in the street dead, with some showing signs of torture. 70 GIs have been killed in Iraq in the past month, and over 2400 have been killed since the […]

Susan Sarandon and Death Threats Susan Sarandon’s description of how alone and obviously afraid she felt as she received death threats and faced massive hostility from the public over her opposition in 2003 to the war is touching. ‘ In an interview to be shown on the Jonathan Dimbleby programme today, Sarandon recalled how she […]