Juan Cole

Signs are appearing in Europe that the Israeli hawks are finding it more difficult to operate with impunity. Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli military attack on virtually defenseless Gaza last winter appears to have wrought significant damage on Israel’s image and standing, and opened it to punitive measures and even boycotts in Europe, unlike previous […]

Former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani will deliver a Friday prayers address in Tehran this week. A behind the scenes backer of the opposition candidate for president Mir Hosain Mousavi, Rafsanjani has kept a low profile since his candidate was declared a loser in the June 12 election. Mousavi and the other reformist candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, […]

It turns out that the secret CIA program that Leon Panetta cancelled, and which former VP Richard Bruce Cheney ordered hidden from Congress, was in fact an assassination squad focusing on al-Qaeda figures. The problem with assassination teams is that they are extra-judicial. They are killing people who have not been proven to have done […]

Jonathan Lyons writes in a guest editorial for IC: The Western world knows the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as a political radical, the militant revolutionary who overthrew the U.S.-backed shah in 1979 and established an Islamic state shortly thereafter. But it is as a religious radical that Khomeini should go down in history, for he […]

Update: Guerrillas set off bombs outside churches in Baghdad on Sunday, wounding 7 persons. Attacks on Christians are a hallmark of the extremist Salafi groups in Sunnism. About half of Iraq’s indigenous Christian community has fled the country since 2003, and there now may be as few as 400,000 left. Late reports put the number […]

I can tell by various web metrics that you guys are not interested in the Afghanistan story. You should be and I am going to parse it today anyway. It is one of the advantages of being non-profit that I write what I want and you can read it or not as you like. But […]

The USG Open Source Center translates or paraphrases articles in the Afghan press during June on that country’s economy. I take away the impression that very little has been done to improve Kabul, that 45 percent of the capital’s residents lack electricity, and that 99 percent of people in Nuristan are below the poverty line. […]

AP reports the course of Thursday’s protests in Tehran. Some 2,000 protesters initially gathered in several spots in the capital, later growing some 3,000 strong. Outside Tehran University, an approaching crowd grew 1,000 strong. Police prevented them from entering the campus, AP says, but then allowed them to gather and chant ‘Death to the dictator!’ […]

Hundreds of protesters braved tear gas and even some live fire to march toward Tehran University on Thursday, commemorating a crushed student protest movement of 1999 a s well as protesting the allegedly stolen elections of June 12. Police intervened to disperse them. A new and significant feature of this demonstration was that simultaneous rallies […]