Juan Cole

You get your pick of polls on the Afghanistan war this morning. AP-GfK found only 40% of Americans any longer support the war, though they back sending one-off expeditionary forces to fight specific terrorist threats. Quinnipiac found a slight majority still in favor of the war. Widely diverging results such as this one suggest either […]

Nasrine Gross writes in a guest op-ed for IC Friends & Colleagues, I have just returned from Kabul. And I am shocked how little the extent of fraud in the presidential elections is understood outside Afghanistan. In this regard I have some data that I would like to share. During the summer and up until […]

When you tool around the blogosphere and the news sites, the discourse about Iran’s nuclear program is maddeningly contradictory. But I think a single hypothesis can account for all the known facts. These are: 1. Iran is making a drive to close the fuel cycle and to be capable of independently enriching uranium to at […]

On Saturday morning, a force of some 300 guerrillas attacked a US outpost and an Afghan police outpost in Nuristan. They killed 8 US troops and two Afghan police, but failed to overwhelm the bastions, and had to withdraw in the face of withering US air power once it arrived. Some of the fighters are […]

Some random anonymous person got posted over at Daily Dish who critiqued my column on the top things you think about Iran that are not true. This person pretended to refute my column, but as is typical in propaganda, he really only harped on a few minor details and said nothing about the column’s larger […]

International Atomic Energy Agency official Mohammad Elbaradei arrived in Tehran on Saturday to begin making preparations for the inspection of Iran’s new nuclear research facility near Qom. The NYT reports that an internal IAEA report concludes that Iran now has the data to construct a nuclear weapon. Which means that there is no point in […]

The US plan to place further sanctions on Iran for its nuclear energy research program may founder at the United Nations Security Council because of the reluctance of Russia and China to see the sanctions ratcheted up. Russia Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov expressed cautious optimism on Friday on the Iran issue: He said, “The agreements […]

For 8 years, Bush-Cheney practiced what I call “belligerent Ostrichism” toward Iran. They refused to talk to Tehran. They wanted to ratchet up sanctions on it. Bush sent 2 aircraft carriers to the Gulf to menace Iran. Bush’s spokesmen professed themselves afraid of Iran’s unarmed little speedboats in the Gulf. Aside from issuing threats to […]

Thursday is a fateful day for the world, as the US, other members of the United Nations Security Council, and Germany meet in Geneva with Iran in a bid to resolve outstanding issues. Although Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had earlier attempted to put the nuclear issue off the bargaining table, this rhetorical flourish was a […]