Juan Cole

A US soldier from Wisconsin was announced killed in Afghanistan on Wednesday (he died on Tuesday). Three British soldiers were killed Wednesday by a roadside bomb in the southern Pushtun Helmand Province, and another died in hospital from wounds earlier received in Helman. The death bring the toll among the multi-national forces since Friday to […]

An informed observer writes in a guest op-ed for IC: I am troubled by the publication of Uri Dromey’s piece in today’s Guardian. My reaction to the content is that the piece attempts to blame the victims– which is a well known sophist technique. As for the misleading explanations of what seems to be the […]

President Obama included this sentence in his State of the Union Address , “I will soon announce a way forward in Iraq that leaves Iraq to its people and responsibly ends this war.” The LAT explains this cryptic reference, based on leaks that suggest that President Obama will announce next week a 19-month timetable for […]

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will announce at the Gaza donor’s conference next week that the US will give $900 million to help rebuild the Gaza Strip. That is about a billion dollars. It is obvious why Clinton is making this gesture. The United States’s name is mud in much of the Muslim world because […]

The following comments may contain spoilers. Directors Danny Boyle’s and Loveleen Tandan‘s “Slumdog Millionaire” swept the Oscars this year, in a remarkable sign of globalization. The creative team behind the film was largely British (Tandan began as a casting director and the screenplay was by Simon Beaufoy). But it was based on an Indian novel […]

Some parts of the world, you know better than others even if you are a world traveler. The Khan al-Khalili Bazaar in Cairo is one of those special places for me. I once interviewed its older goldsmiths and silversmiths about their recollections of when the jewellers’ guilds disappeared. They thought, the 1940s. I ransacked the […]

The satirical comedy skits put on by Lior Klein concerning Jesus and Mary on Israel’s Channel 10 last week have provoked rallies and protests by Palestinian-Israeli Christians, of whom there are about 120,000. They also drew condemnation from Muslim Palestinian-Israelis, of whom there are over a million. Klein said that since Christians were denying the […]

As I mentioned yesterday, Iran is not producing weapon-grade uranium, and could not easily do so without detection. The Hindu, which despite its name is left of center (and which is one of India’s finest newspapers) writes: ‘ Iran has not converted the low-grade uranium that it has produced into weapon-grade uranium, inspectors belonging to […]

Note to mainstream media: Iran cannot construct nuclear bombs with uranium enriched only to less than 4%. It needs to be enriched to something like 90% to make a bomb. Iran is not known even to have that capability, and no it cannot be done in 2 months (try a decade), assuming they were trying […]