Juan Cole

Today’s story about Iraq is a story of conflict between Gen. Ray Odierno and the Iraqi parliament. Elements in the cabinet and the parliament put pressure on Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki not only to put the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the US to a referendum on Jan. 15, but also to allow Iraqis […]

President Barack Obama gave a major speech on the Afghanistan War to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Phoenix, Arizona, on Monday. Ironically, the American Taliban was milling around outside the hall with guns as Obama spoke. Others have pointed out that Bush’s handlers would never have allowed any such thing. Hell, they unconstitutionally designated […]

Incumbent Afghan president Hamid Karzai is clearly feeling the breath of his main rival in the presidential contest on the back of his neck. He haughtily declined to debate his leading rivals earlier this summer. But on Sunday, he went on television to debate two of them. A third leading rival, Abdullah Abdullah, refused to […]

In Baghdad, two bombs went off near a falafel stand and killed 8 and wounded 21 persons Al-Zaman [The Times of Baghdad] reports in Arabic on other attacks on Sunday. In Fallujah, armed guerrillas invaded the home of a policemen, killing 4 family members and wounding 3 others. They then blew up the house, in […]

While Americans are debating their own health system, they are unindicted co-conspirators in an effort to degrade the health, mental and physical, and to half-starve the people of Gaza. The callousness, ruthlessness and selfishness of this policy, in which all Americans are implicated, is breathtaking. In Gaza, there really were death panels deciding who lived […]

Some 22 militants died in fighting in Gaza between Hamas and the Army of God’s Helpers on Friday, the latter being a radical fundamentalist cult that took some of its cues from al-Qaeda and the Taliban and demanded the imposition of a rigid understanding of Islamic law in Gaza, as well as plotting global holy […]

Check out this blog of an interesting experiment in American public diplomacy in Syria: “The American MidEast Leadership Network’s (AMLN’s) Virtual Scrapbook is an online collection of the thoughts, musings, favorite things, photographs, and video/audio clips collected by the participants and administrators of AMLN’s Grassroots Diplomacy Program, a three-week cultural exchange program between American and […]

A suicide bomber penetrated several rings of security in Kabul and detonated his payload outside NATO headquarters next to the American Embassy, killing 7 persons and wounding 91. Police and a parliamentarian are among the wounded. AFP reports that as many as 10 percent of voting places may be closed on election day, out of […]

I am sure they are smart people, but every once in a while the journalists working for the mainstream media deliver themselves of the opinion that exercise does not help you lose weight, or that, indeed, there is no way to lose weight. This article in Time says that the reporter’s friends removed the benefit […]