Juan Cole

Shiites Seek Something Close to Free Elections A glimpse of the likely strategy of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and his chief aides can be found in an Iranian news report quoting this week’s Friday sermon of Shaikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala’i, Sistani’s representative in the holy city of Karbala. “Karbalai told reporters after the prayers that […]

Senior US Officials Knew in May there was no WMD in Iraq The Observer reports that “US military survey teams sent to visit suspected sites of WMD, and intelligence interviews with Iraqi scientists and officials, had concluded” . . . as early as last May that there were no chemical or biological weapons stockpiles in […]

Rieff on Iraqi Shiites David Rieff”s excellent firsthand report from Iraq on the Shiite movements there in the New York Times magazine is now available online (free registration required). This report seems to me among the more realistic and informed assessments of the situation yet to appear in the Western press. Rieff has done an […]

Dutch Embassy Destroyed by Rocket; 4 Policemen gunned down in Mosul According to wire services, Baghdad was shaken by several explosions late Friday night, including two rocket-propelled grenade attacks on the Dutch embassy in Baghdad that set it ablaze briefly before the fire was extinguished. No one was harmed, since the building was unoccupied. US […]

Debate Begins on Constitutional Provisions in Iraq Alissa Rubin of the Los Angeles Times has a fine piece today discussing debates in Iraq over the Fundamental Law that will govern the country until a constitution is crafted. She points out that several members of the Interim Governing Council reject the idea of a 3-man rotating […]

MI6 to be Called before Parliament on Weapons Estimates The London Times reports that “Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, will appear before the Intelligence and Security Committee, headed by Ms Ann Taylor, the former Labour Cabinet minister, to give further evidence on why he believed that the intelligence on Saddam’s weapons was reliable […]

The Islamic Party: Neither US nor IGC Suited to Organizing General Elections Az-Zaman reports that the Iraqi Islamic Party (the Iraqi branch of the Sunni fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood) has expressed support for the Nov. 15 agreement between the US and the Interim Governing Council, saying that elections based on provincial councils would produce a government […]

Demonstrations in Halbaniya Hundreds demonstrated peacefully in the Sunni Arab town of Halbaniya on Friday against US tactics, and against the curfew imposed on the city by the US authorities. (-Ash-Sharq al-Awsat).

Who is Hasan Ghul? The Kurdish peshmergas apprehended an Egyptian member of al-Qaeda trying to sneak into Iraq recently, and the US hailed the capture as significant. Ghul was said to have been working directly under Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, one of the planners of September 11. But the London-based moderate Saudi newspaper al-Hayat raised the […]