Juan Cole

Courtesy Jamiol’s World

Egypt’s President Muhammad Morsi, a member of the same Muslim Brotherhood that gave birth to Palestine’s Hamas movement, has emerged as a key broker in the Gaza crisis. President Obama is said to have called him for the third time in 24 hours on Tuesday! Morsi sympathizes with the stateless Palestinians, who are being kept […]

The USG Open Source Center summarizes the Israeli press on the inadvisability of a ground assault on Gaza, and right-wing suggestions for alternatives such as cutting off water and electricity to the Gaza Strip. The latter proposal was also made by Gilad Sharon, son of the former prime minister, who said that Gaza should be […]

Jennifer Granholm of Current TV’s “War Room” (10 pm ET) interviewed me on Gaza:

Israeli air strikes for the past 6 days have killed over 100 Palestinians in Gaza, many of them women and children; one strike deliberately targeted a media building that Israeli government knew to house journalists. Medics announced Monday that they are running out of key medicines (Gaza is under Israeli blockade). Military strikes are also […]

From Democracy Now! – a live report from a Gaza hospital The blurb for the show: We get a live report from independent journalist Mohammed Omer from a hospital in Gaza City, where injured journalists, medical workers and civilians — including children — are arriving for treatment. An award-winning journalist based in Gaza, Omer has […]

Abd al-Ra’uf Arna’ut writes in the PLO newspaper al-Ayyam (The Days) that behind the scenes, the Obama administration and its European allies are exerting enormous pressure on Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu to refrain from launching a land invasion of Gaza. He maintains that the air war against Gaza, which might attrite Hamas’s stock of […]

Regular readers know that I have been critical of Gen. Petraeus’s counterinsurgency doctrine because I found it unrealistic, and I wish the US had just withdrawn militarily from Afghanistan in 2002. Lt. Col. John L. Cook, Ret., argues in his new book that the counterinsurgency doctrine made for bad military tactics and strategy on the battlefield. […]

Ellen Cantarow writes at Tomdispatch: There’s a war going on that you know nothing about between a coalition of great powers and a small insurgent movement.  It’s a secret war being waged in the shadows while you go about your everyday life. In the end, this conflict may matter more than those in Iraq and […]