Juan Cole

Towers of Beirut Readers have asked me to what Bin Laden was referring when he said he first conceived the idea of attacking US skyscrapers when the Israelis destroyed the “towers” of Beirut. Beirut had been among the more advanced cities in the Arab world. I saw it in 1968 and 1974 before the civil […]

Elections and Religious Tensions in Iraq Al-Hayat reports that Shaikh Sadr al-Din Qubanji, a Friday mosque preacher for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, criticized “religious figures who doubt” everything and “threaten” to boycott the elections, which will “make manifest the rights of the Shiites.” He asked the doubters if they wanted “the […]

The Other Shoe Drops: Bin Laden Weighs in It is interesting that Usamah Bin Laden explicitly said that it doesn’t matter to al-Qaeda whether Bush or Kerry is president. Only the degree to which the US gives “liberty” to the Muslim world matters to al-Qaeda, he says. [I’ll have things to say about this diction […]

Pentagon Briefing on Missing Explosives I just watched the Larry DiRita host a Pentagon briefing on the issue of the missing explosives at al-Qaqaa. I was disgusted by the political spin DiRita was putting out. The Pentagon should be serving the military needs of the whole United States, not of the Bush administration. DiRita kept […]

US Has Killed 100,000 in Iraq: The Lancet The Lancet, a respected British medical journal, reports that the US and coalition forces (but mainly the US Air Force) has killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians since the fall of Saddam on April 9, 2003. Previous estimates for civilian deaths since the beginning of the war ranged up […]

Missing HMX: It Really is Missing The evidence accumulates hourly that deadly HMX explosives were at the al-Qaqaa facility on April 18 of 2003 and subsequently disappeared. The allegation that the material was moved by the Saddam regime between March 16 and April 9 does not seem to me to get Bush off the hook. […]

2 US Troops, 15 Others killed 17 persons died in violent attacks in Iraq on Thursday, including two US troops. Al-Hayat reports that Grand Ayatollah met with the Chaldean Patriarch. The grand ayatollah urged Christian Iraqis to vote, and condemned attacks on Christian churches by what he called “takfiri” forces. The practice of declaring some […]

Breaking News: Film Crew May have Smoking Gun A US film crew has footage of the explosives at al-Qaqaa that later went missing. This development may be the downside of embedding for the US military. It makes things hard to deny later on if you leave a filmed trail. For instance, the Russians can’t have […]

Iraqi Officials Deny Early Disappearance of Explosives Dr. Muhammad Sharaa who leads Iraq’s science monitoring department, denies that the 380 tons of high explosives that has gone missing could have been moved in spring of 2003 before or during the war. AFP reports: “It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this […]