Juan Cole

Some 4,000 US military personnel and 650 Afghan troops are launching an assault on Taliban positions in Helmand Province, with an aim to ‘take, clear and hold’ in emulation of the counter-insurgency tactics deployed successfully in some parts of Iraq. Helmand has been a particularly violent province in recent years, and is also the major […]

Reuters reports that Iranian opposition leader Mir Hosain Mousavi is continuing to assert that the newly formed second-term government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is illegitimate. He called for a lifting of censorship and the release of the some one thousand Iranians arrested by security forces for participating in demonstrations against the allegedly stolen election. He […]

This message was received by email from Tehran three hours ago. I have anonymized it and made a couple of orthographical corrections and am passing it on for what it is worth. – JC And on the thirteenth day Michael Jackson died. Voice of America and BBC Persian are back up, if intermittently, and we […]

The casualty toll in the Kirkuk bombing on Tuesday has risen to 33, with about 100 injured. Four US troops were killed in Iraq on Tuesday, as well, though the circumstances are still murky. The Iraqi civil wars kicked off by the American invasion of 2003 continue. I’m sure a lot of observers think it […]

T.S. Eliot wrote at the end of “Hollow Men” in 1926, “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” He may as well have been talking about the war George W. Bush launched in Iraq in 2003. The end of routine, independent patrolling of major Iraqi cities by US […]

The phase of mass protest in the aftermath of the controversial election results of June 12 has drawn to a close for the moment. Movement activists can no longer put tens of thousands of protesters in the street because the security forces are too well organized and too loyal to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to allow […]

Mansoor Moaddel writes in a guest editorial for IC: The current civil uprising in Iran reflects not just a protest against a rigged election. Nor is it primarily a symptom of contentions for power or clashes between opposing perspectives on the nature of the Islamic regime. It is, rather, resistance against a political coup, whose […]

CNN is reporting that 5,000 dissidents marched silently on Shariati street near a major mosque in downtown Tehran, ostensibly in honor of cleric Mohammad Beheshti, who was killed in a bombing by the terrorist organization Mojahedin-e Khalq (Holy Warriors of the People) in 1981. But in fact they were protesting the stealing of the recent […]

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki maintained Saturday that Iraq is ready to provide its own security in the cities, as US troops cease patrolling. This despite the raft of bombings that kille about 200 people last week. Aljazeera English has video on the lack of political progress and the failure of reconciliation in Iraq. End/ […]