By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – A couple of years ago an oil tanker showed up off the Texas coast with cargo from Iraqi Kurdistan. The problem? Iraqi Kurdistan is a province of Iraq, and the central government in Baghdad claims that petroleum discovered in Iraqi Kurdistan is under the control of […]
No, America, it wasn’t Russia: You did it to Yourself
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The headlines scream, “Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House” and “Obama orders review of Russian Hacking during Presidential campaign.” I don’t doubt that the Russian Federation employs hackers and PR people to influence public opinion and even election outcomes […]
How We Can fight back against Trump’s Anti-EPA
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Trump’s nomination of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency is a slap in the face of every American who cares about the environment in this country. Pruitt has repeatedly sued the EPA for doing its job. He is a climate change […]
Syria unlikely to be Partitioned: The Resilience of Colonial Borders
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Whenever a country falls into civil war, there are always observers who suggest that the problem could be resolved by a partition of that country. It is as though they think the parties to the war are like squabbling children in the back seat of the […]
More districts of East Aleppo fall to Regime & Militia Allies
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Both regime sources and the Britain-based Syria Observatory said Tuesday that the Syrian Arab Army and its Shiite militia allies from Lebanon and Iraq had taken the district of Shaar in the East Aleppo pocket. In the past two weeks rebel forces have lost the northeast […]
After Nov. 8: Countdown to Doomsday
By John Feffer | (Tomdispatch.com) | – – I didn’t vote in the pivotal American election of 2016. Thirty-five years ago, in that unseasonably warm month of November, I was in Antarctica’s Allan Hills taking ice core samples with a hand augur. The pictures I have from that time show my team drilling deep into […]
White Terrorism in the White House? Did Trump’s Bannon, Breitbart inspire Pizzeria Shooter?
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Imagine if they had been Muslims. What if a Muslim publication pushed a false conspiracy theory accusing high American officials and an ordinary American restaurant of being involved in child abuse? and then an unbalanced Muslim went into it and shot off a firearm on the […]
In the shadow of Trump, a DAPL Victory and Global Protests against Fossil Fuels
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The surprise announcement Sunday by the Army Corps of Engineers that they will not permit the Dakota Access Pipeline to go under the Missouri River, thus ending the threat to Standing Rock Sioux land and lives, marked a signal success for the environmental protest movement and […]
Why Trump & his Cabinet’s Jihad against “Political Islam” will Fail
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Several members of Donald Trump’s new team, including National Security Adviser Mike Flynn and proposed Secretary of Defense Mike Mattis have expressed themselves troubled about “political Islam” (or in Flynn’s case, just “Islam”). Mattis seems to have confused Daesh’s (ISIS, ISIL) idea of a neo-Caliphate (bringing […]
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