Juan Cole

I give the text of President Obama’s speech on security below, along with video. Unlike the two speeches Obama gave in the immediate aftermath of the attempted underpants bombing, in this one the president was focused and decisive. As amazing as it seems, it appears that the Obama team had just never sat down and […]

In the past three weeks, Iran observers have been baffled by the range of opinion appearing on the op-ed page of The New York Times concerning Iran, and the uneven reporting on that country. Before the holidays, Alan Kuperman, a political scientist at the University of Texas Austin, called for bombing Iran– becoming the first […]

President Obama spoke firmly and with some smoldering anger on Tuesday about the failure of US intelligence to ‘connect the dots’ of information it had in hand about how dangerous Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the attempted airline bomber, had become. AP has video: I think two things could help fix the intelligence failure. One is just […]

Guantanamo: The Definitive Prisoner List (Updated for 2010) | Andy Worthington Worthington has updated his invaluable list of Guantanamo prisoners, including those released. He shows that most were arrested arbitrarily and were probably innocent. He has also recently argued against the anti-Yemen hysteria of recent weeks being used as a pretext for not releasing dozens […]

The world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifah or Khalifah Tower, was unveiled in Dubai on Monday. AP has video Dubai is a finance hub, the bubble of which has burst, so the building’s opening now seems a critique of past excesses more than the triumph originally dreamed of. Now that Dubai is having to be bailed […]

Surprises in the Asia Society poll done in June, 2009, of attitudes of Afghans. It was a big poll, with some 6400 respondents from all over the country. It reveals a society increasingly connected by new communications technology, where devotion to democratic values is deepening and commitment to women’s rights is rapidly growing. The stereotype […]

You probably won’t see it in most US news outlets, but on Monday morning in Kabul and Jalalabad, hundreds of university students demonstrated against US strikes this weekend that allegedly killed a number of civilians. I want to underline the irony that the students in Tehran University are protesting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while students in these […]

The Lippard Blog: Who are the climate change skeptics? Follow the money End/ (Not Continued)

The WSJ headlines that Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano “has become “a target” for the GOP in the wake of the attempted Christmas day bombing of a Northwest Airliner. And I expect Ms. Napolitano, an extremely competent civil servant, to take a drubbing on the Sunday talk shows today. So let us look more closely […]