Juan Cole

There is no good evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. It has offered to allow regular International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of the newly announced facility near Qom, which would effectively prevent it from being used for weapons production. There is a secret nuclear facility in the Middle East, however, producing plutonium and […]

On Sunday morning, a Taliban suicide bombing attack struck at the entourage of Ismail Khan, the Afghan Minister of Energy and Water, in Herat, according to the Afghan Voice Agency writing in Persian. Ismail Khan is from the western, Dari Persian-speaking city of Herat, and was its governor before being inducted into the central government’s […]

American and Western discussions of what to do about Iran almost completely ignore Iraq. But no economic sanctions can effectively be placed on Iran without Iraqi support. A gasoline embargo would fail completely if Iraqis smuggled gasoline to Iran (which they certainly would, both for economic and religious reasons). Jalal Talabani, the president of Iraq, […]

The news in the US is about several terrorist plots, some by Christians and some by Muslim expatriates, which have been averted by good police work, by the FBI and its local colleagues. In Pakistan, the news is about a terrorist plot that was not averted. Update: Two further blasts in the Northwest brought the […]

Usama Bin Laden’s latest screed on the Western evacutation from Afghanistan is the height of hypocrisy, since Bin Laden actively connived at getting Western troops to go there. Abdel Bar Atwan is a prominent Arab journalist and intellectual. Here what he said about his meeting with Bin Laden in 1996: ‘ Osama Bin Laden told […]

So I did this posting on Thursday night, below, on how I perceive President Obama to be maneuvering Iran into a box, wherein it faced increasing chances of the ratcheting up of sanctions by the United Nations Security Council. Then I went to bed and got on a plane the next morning and checked in […]

President Obama is slowly putting Iran in a box. His cancellation of the useless and expensive so-called “missile shield” program in eastern Europe, which had needlessly antagonized Russia, has been rewarded with greater Russian cooperativeness on Iran. The US right wing accused Obama of a failure of nerve. But in fact his move was shrewd […]

Aljazeera English reports on Ahmadinejad’s appearance at the United Nations: IRNA gives lengthy excerpts from Ahmadinejad’s address at the United Nations. ‘ President Ahmadinejad, who began his address thanking Almighty God for having granted him the chance to attend the “important global assembly”, said that he had already spoken to world leaders about the major […]

Ido Oren and Ty Solomon write in a guest op-ed for IC: Five years ago, Charles Duelfer, Head of the Iraq Survey Group, presented to Congress the final report of his 1200 member team, which concluded that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction when it was invaded by the United States in 2003. […]