Juan Cole

Chris Woods, Jack Serle and Alice K. Ross write at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism: Reported civilian deaths fell sharply in Pakistan in 2012, with Bureau data suggesting that a minimum of 2.5% of those reported killed were civilians – compared with more than 14% in 2011. This suggests the CIA is seeking to limit […]

  Kirk J. Beattie writes in a guest column for Informed Comment: Most concerned Americans have, understandably, had their eyes glued on the monumental changes sweeping the Arab world. But they remain largely oblivious to another regional transformation of great significance; that is, the rightward shift of Israel’s political, tectonic plates. From its historically strong […]

The UN Human Rights Commission under Navi Pillai has had a team of researchers go through five different lists of casualties in Syria, and they concluded that at least 60,000 have died since the revolution began some 20 months ago. Some 500,000 Syrians have fled or been made refugees by the fighting, about 2 percent […]

Just for fun: What was our world like a thousand years ago? Of course, technologically very different, but Song China and Muslim Spain had made real advances in science, technology and infrastructure. If CNN had existed then, what major events would they have listed and passed around by carrier pigeon? Some of the themes salient […]

Muhammad Shahid Nazir had a hero’s welcome at Lahore airport last week. The fishmonger had gone to the UK last summer and worked in an east London fish market. His boss asked him to do something to attract attention to his sale of fish (one per British pound, $1.60 US). So he made up a […]

While it is important that the Bush tax giveaway to the wealthy begin to be reversed if the US budget is ever to recover its health, the bigger significance of the budget deal passed yesterday by both houses of Congress is that the wind power tax break was restored for 2013. Actually, even this extension […]

2013 will see Iranian influence in the Middle East continue a decline that began with the Arab upheavals of 2011. Iran’s two major allies in the Arab world are Syria and Lebanon. In Lebanon, Iran arms the Shiite party-militia Hizbullah, and does so overland through Iraq and Syria. Since Israel controls the Mediterranean off Lebanon […]

Fireworks at the iconic Burj Khalifa in Dubai for 2013: Dubai is back. Its economy grew 3.2 percent in 2012, owing in part to good economic growth among its two major trade partners, China and India, and in part to the United Arab Emirates federal government having stepped in to use government stimulus to achieve […]

Demonstrations and rallies began being held in the largely Sunni Arab province of al-Anbar and spread to Samarra (Salahuddin) and Nineva in Iraq on December 26. Sometimes crowds flew the flag of the Free Syrian Army, with which Iraqi Sunnis often identify, since the FSA is fighting a Shiite-dominated regime. The Sunni Arab youth are […]