Juan Cole

Top challenges for Obama at the United Nations this week, including Tuesday’s climate conference, and then the G20 on Thursday and Friday. In many instances, we can blame the difficult position he will find himself in on the US Senate. 1. Obama came into office with an ambitious agenda to develop alternative energy and cut […]

My column is out in Salon.com, on the way in which Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are turning Iran into a pariah state. I warn that if they keep going down this path, they are going to end up like North Korea. Excerpt: ‘Iran’s hard-liners are pushing their country into a dangerous and perhaps crippling isolation that […]

There is a serious and growing rift between the Obama White House and the uniformed officers over Afghanistan policy, according to Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karen DeYoung at WaPo. They have seen the review produced by Gen. Stanley McChrystal,which warns that unless more US troops are injected into Afghanistan during the next year, the counter-insurgency effort […]

The USG Open Source Center translates Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s Eid al-Fitr Sermon, in which he categorically rejects the idea of Iran ever developing, possessing or using nuclear weapons. Iran’s Supreme Leader Rejects Nuclear WeaponsSpeech by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i at a meeting with senior officials and people on Id al-Fitr — recordedVision […]

Iranian authorities maintained that they counted the ballots of a nationwide election in June in only about 10 hours and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad immediately claimed victory, despite widespread suspicions of fraud. Afghanistan held its presidential election on August 20 and all the ballots are still not counted, and it isn’t clear whether there will be a […]

Newsweek is reporting that the US intelligence community continues to assess that Iran is not working on getting a nuclear weapon. Iran insists that its nuclear energy research program is for the purpose of producing fuel for the Bushehr reactors when their construction is complete. I.e. they are seeking an “exotic way of boiling water” […]

Note: Revised 9/21/09 President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave a sermon on Friday for “Jerusalem Day” that is full of the most vile crackpot anti-Semitism that can be imagined. Anti-Semitism as a form of bigotry typically ascribes the most abject motives and character to Jews in general at the same time as they are depicted as secretly […]

A suicide bomber used a huge truck bomb to blow up the market in the Shiite village of Ustarzai, Kohat District, killing 33 and wounding 80. Many shops, buildings and vehicles were destroyed in the blast. The village is largely inhabited by Bangash Pashtuns, who tend to follow the Shiite branch of Islam, unlike most […]

Guerrillas attacked an Italian convoy in Kabul on Thursday, killing 6 Italian troops and 10 Afghan civilians, and wounding over 50 others. Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi as a result called for foreign troops to depart Afghanistan sooner rather than later. It had already been decided that 500 of Italy’s 3000-strong military mission would soon go […]