By Juan Cole 1. On Sunday evening, BBC reports that Iraqi fighter jets bombed the villages of al-Riyadh and al-Nirab in the vicinity of Hawija, north Iraq, leaving 14 dead and 10 wounded. Hawija is a largely Sunni Arab town near the city of Kirkuk (Kirkuk is controlled now by the Kurdistan Peshmerga paramilitary). The […]
Cole’s “The New Arabs” at Firedoglake Book Salon
By Juan Cole Firedoglake Book Salon on Juan Cole, The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is changing the Middle East See also this recent NYT review by Irshad Manji FDL Book Salon Welcomes Juan Cole, The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East Author: CTuttle Sunday, September 7, 2014 12:15 […]
Top 5 Signs the US is de facto allied with Iran versus ISIL
By Juan Cole 1. Karen DeYoung points out that the siege of the Iraqi Shiite town of Amerli could not have been broken without the help of Shiite militiamen from the Badr Corps, the Salaam Brigades (Mahdi Army) and the extremist Asa’ib Ahl al-Haqq. The US essentially provided them close air support against the Salafi […]
Elon Musk’s Nevada Gigafactory may Save the World
By Juan Cole KRQE: “Official: Tesla picks Nevada for Gigafactory” Clean Technica points out that the battery-making factory is on track to reduce battery prices by 30% by 2017, making EVs indisputably cheaper than fossil fuel-driven internal combustion, at less than $100 per kilowatt hour. (Of course, if externalities are taken into account, like the […]
Obama & Cameron find little Enthusiasm at NATO for new Iraq War
By Juan Cole The NATO summit in Wales was supposed to be all about getting out of Afghanistan. Instead, two new issues dominated it– the Ukraine and ISIL in Iraq and Syria. British prime minister David Cameron joined Barack Obama in castigating NATO members for paying ransoms to ISIL and for not stepping up to […]
Would a US/ NATO war in Syria be Legal in International Law?
By Juan Cole Efforts are being made in Congress give to President Barack Obama the formal authority to conduct air strikes in Syria against ISIL. Vice President Joe Biden is now talking, as well, about a concerted and long-term NATO response to the brutal fundamentalist movement, which controls desert territory and some oil resources in […]
What the Hackers did to Celebs? The NSA has been Doing that to All of US instead of Predicting ISIL
By Juan Cole There has been a lot of justifiable outrage about the invasion of privacy of celebrities and the posting of their private, nude photos at 4Chan by hackers who apparently got into their cloud accounts. It seems odd to me that the discussion of this issue has been completely unconnected to the Snowden […]
Can Iraqi forces take back Saddam’s Birthplace from ISIL?
By Juan Cole Joint Iraqi and Kurdish forces began moving into Tikrit on Tuesday night into Wednesday after victories over the so-called Islamic State of Syria and the Levant in villages around Amerli, including Sulaiman Bek. Several previous attempts to take Tikrit this summer have failed. On Monday, allied Iraqi forces cleared the Shiite Turkmen […]
Top 5 Reasons “Labor Day” isn’t for Laborers Anymore
By Juan Cole Calling the bottom of a river a “bed” is a metaphor. Imagine the river restlessly sleeping on its muddy mattress. But when we’ve so internalized a metaphor that we forget it is a figure of speech, as with the phrase “river bed,” it is called a “dead metaphor.” Labor Day is, alas, […]
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