Juan Cole

Afghanistan postpones parliamentary elections – latimes.com The LAT lays out the basic facts around the postponement of parliamentary elections in Afghanistan. The Afghan press stresses two factors aboveall: Afghanpaper.com writing in Dari Persian says it was told by concerned Afghan officials who declined to allow their names to be used that the four-month delay was […]

An audio message allegedly from Usamah Bin Laden was released Sunday, claiming that the attempted Christmas day airline attack over Detroit was his work. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assert two things about the audio. First, I do not think it is genuine. Second, I think it demonstrates that Bin […]

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates’s trip to Pakistan this weekend has in many ways been public relations disaster, and I think it is fair to say that he came away empty-handed with regard to his chief policy goals in Islamabad. Getting Pakistan right is key to President Barack Obama’s policy of escalating the Afghanistan […]

Seumas Milne: “Haiti’s poverty is treated as some ­baffling quirk of history…when in reality it is the direct ­consequence of a uniquely brutal ­relationship with the outside world — notably the US, France and Britain — stretching back centuries.” (h/t reddit.com). One of the many ways in which Aljazeera is superior to American news programs […]

Iraq war was illegal, Dutch panel rules | World news | guardian.co.uk Of course it was illegal. There are only two conditions under which war may be launched according to the United Nations Charter, which most countries have signed. One is self-defense. Iraq did not attack the US in 2003. The other is if the […]

Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Baghdad on Friday in a bid to settle conflicts over the March 7 parliamentary elections. The exclusion of hundreds of candidates from the upcoming Iraqi parliamentary elections by the Accountability and Justice Committee, and signed off on by the High Electoral Commission, continues to generate lively controversy in Iraq. […]

Of course, I– like many social critics– am dismayed at the Supreme Court ruling striking down elements of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, and essentially giving corporations carte blanche to pay for attack videos against candidates they do not like and to release them late in a campaign. But some of the hand-wringing about […]

When a relief plane for the Physicians without Borders isn’t allowed to land by US military authorities at the airport in Port-au-Prince, there is an outcry. But Israeli military authorities will not allow any relief planes at all to land in the Gaza Strip (the Israelis destroyed Gaza’s airport in 2001). We cheer when a […]

Brown Wins, Robs Dems Of Filibuster-Proof Majority – Hotline On Call Juan cannot understand why Scott Brown can be elected with just 52% of the Massachusetts vote, but we can’t pass universal health care with 52% of the Senate vote. End/ (Not Continued)