Juan Cole

Hamid Dabashi at CNN points out that the US executive’s (the Obama administration’s) plans to engage Iran may come up against Congress’s desire to act aggressively toward the country, either through crippling sanctions or covert operations. A recent congressional hearing on Iran chaired by Howard Berman stacked the decks in favor of the Neoconservatives, 4 […]

Even the official Iranian site Press TV had to admit that of 70 reformist members of parliament, only 13 attended Ahmadinejad’s inauguration. AP has more on Wednesday’s protests. Opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi called Wednesday for the regime to permit continued demonstrations by the reform faction. Freedom of assembly is guaranteed in the Iranian constitution. (But […]

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in as president of Iran on Wednesday, to scattered protests. Several hundred protesters were said to have marched around the parliament building where the ceremony took place, despite a heavy police presence. Cell phone and text messaging services are said to have been interrupted by the regime. Ahmadinejad responded to news […]

“the unwise impulse to negotiations. . .” Or the answer to the question of “Where have all the Neocons gone? Aljazeera English has video:

The certification of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the winner of the presidential election in a special ceremony in Tehran set off demonstrations by thousands of protesters in downtown Tehran, according to the official Iranian Press TV news service. Police intervened, producing clashes that went on into the evening. Borzou Daragahi of the LAT writes that “Drivers […]

Keith Olbermann debunks the report that General Electric (owner of MSNBC and NBC) and Rupert Murdoch (owner of Fox Cable News) made a deal to halt the feud between Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly. [Update: Glenn Greenwald explains that there were two issues, 1) whether GE made a deal with Murdoch, and 2) whether Olbermann was […]

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that a delegation from the (Shiite) United Iraqi Alliance [UIA] met for three hours on Sunday with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, seeking his advice on how to rebuild the coalition ahead of January’s parliamentary elections. A leading member of the political delegation was the former BFF of the Neoconservatives, Ahmad Chalabi. […]

See my regular column in Salon.com, “Sarah Palin, meet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: You two right-wing populists have a surprising amount in common.” Excerpt: “Palin portrays herself as the small-town outsider. “I’m not a member of the permanent political establishment,” she proclaimed last fall. She blamed her bad press on not being in the “Washington elite,” when, […]

“Speech by George W. Bush, President of the United States at the United Nations General Assembly, 12 September 2002″, making the case for going to war with Iraq: … In 1991, the Iraqi regime agreed to destroy and stop developing all weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles, and to prove to the world it […]