Juan Cole

Shock of the Week: Liberals in Liberal Arts George Will’s column this week is unusually unreflective. I don’t often agree with Will, but he is usually a bright and well-informed columnist on the Reaganaut Right. He knows enough to castigate Justice Scalia for saying that Darwinian evolution is “only a theory” (a theory is a […]

Elections in Iraq will be Held on Schedule, But with What Result? Or, how Khatami and Krauthammer are Both Wrong At least 12 persons died violently in the guerrilla war on Saturday in Iraq. There was a major battle over control of police stations in Khalis, and Marines found more bodies in Mosul. The US […]

Supporting Nawal Saadawi Al-Hayat on Saturday ran an attack from a Muslim fundamentalist point of view on Egyptian novelist Nawal Saadawi. She recently argued that children should all receive hyphenated last names, from both the mother’s and the father’s side, instead of only the last name of the father. She said that this method would […]

Things are Not What they Seem Department On Thursday night on the David Letterman Late Night show on CBS, actress Natalie Portman announced that she was studying Arabic. On Friday night on the LBC Arabic satellite network the main attraction was a karaoke contest that involved a fair number of old American disco songs from […]

Election Plans Roiled Sunni Extremist Death Threats against Sistani Hamza Hendawi of AP reports that the Shiite vote may get split. He says that Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is declining to join the mega-Shiite party list toward which Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is working. Likewise, it is not clear that Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers […]

Iraq and Damned Statistics The Red Crescent has finally been allowed into Fallujah (its earlier exclusion was probably a violation of international law). Its spokesman is saying that less than 200 civilian families appear to still be there. If this estimate is true, it suggests that by the time of the US assault, only about […]

Guest Editorial: Levine: “Iraq’s Lose-Lose Scenario” Note: This version of the text is slightly revised from the one posted earlier on Friday November 26. Iraq’s Lose-Lose Scenario By Mark LeVine Dept. of History, UC Irvine, author of Why They Don’t Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the ‘Axis of Evil’. Since November 2 I have […]

25,000 US Casualties in Iraq; 9% of Troops Put in Hospital or Killed Over 2000 Iraqis Killed in Fallujah CBS has elicited from the Pentagon the real figure of US casualties in Iraq, which is more like 25,000. That number includes the 1230 or so killed and the 9300 classified as “wounded in battle,” but […]

Bloggers Respond The weblogging community responds to Colonel Yigal Carmon’s outrageous threat to sue me over my characterization of MEMRI as a well-funded organization dedicated to cherry-picking Arab news reports to make them look bad: Brad DeLong says “MEMRI Needs to Be Moved to “Unreliable”: Ah. Clearly it’s time to stop reading (and citing) MEMRI.” […]