Iraq War

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – The Daesh (ISIL or ISIS) burning of a captured Jordanian pilot alive produced justified revulsion globally, resulting in the terrorist organization being termed “barbarous” and similar epithets. Why did it behave this way? Because it wants to terrify its opponents into submission and underline that it is too […]

Bashar al-Assad

Paying the Piper: How America’s Iraq War haunts its Failed Syria Policy

contributors

By Michael MacDonald, author of Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq | (Special to Informed Comment | – If recent reports in the New York Times are to be believed, the Obama administration just got serious about the political realities gripping Syria and Iraq. Up to this point, the US has sought, for reasons […]

Featured

Ironies of Empire: US now Allied with Shiites Trained by Assassinated HIzbullah Leader

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – The revelation by the Washington Post’s Adam Goldman and Ellen Nakashima that the car-bomb assassination of Hizbullah commando Imad Mughniyah in Damascus in 2008 was a joint CIA/ Israeli Mossad operation comes at an awkward time for Washington. The administration of George W. Bush did not target Mughniyah […]

Bush

Bush Admin. Spent Billions on an Iraqi Army with 50,000 “ghost” Soldiers

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | — Iraqi Prime Minister Haydar al-Abadi announced to his parliament on Sunday that inspectors had uncovered 50,000 non-existent soldiers in four divisions of the Iraqi Army. Their pay was presumably being diverted to the officers in the division. This ziggurat of corruption was one reason the army collapsed on June 9, […]

Afghanistan

What if it was Russia and China invading and Bombing? The Blindness of MSM and Washington

contributors

By Tom Engelhardt (Tomdispatch.com) | — Let’s play a game, the kind that makes no sense on this single-superpower planet of ours. For a moment, do your best to suspend disbelief and imagine that there’s another superpower, great power, or even regional power somewhere that, between 2001 and 2003, launched two major wars in the […]

Egypt

The Historical Drivers of Modern Day Developments in Iraq (Cole Interview)

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole, interviewed by Bassam Haddad | — Bassam Haddad, a prominent Syria specialist at George Mason University, interviewed me this fall for the new web radio program Status Hour , on the Middle East. Do check out the range of important interviews already up at the site. My own audio interview is here. […]

CIA

Burned: Valerie Plame Wilson’s new Roman a Clef on Dick Cheney’s Great Betrayal

contributors

Bloomberg “Valerie Plame Wilson, author and former CIA officer, discusses her new book entitled “Burned” and national security in the 21st century with Bloomberg’s Pimm Fox on “Taking Stock.” (Source: Bloomberg)” Channel 4: “Former CIA Agent Valerie Plame Embraces Being ‘Burned’ ”

Bush

For GOP who Question why Iraq didn’t Want US Forces to Stay: “Blackwater Guards Guilty In 2007 Iraq Massacre”

contributors

Cenk Uygur, The Young Turks: “Four former Blackwater security guards were convicted Wednesday in the 2007 shootings of more than 30 Iraqis in Baghdad, an incident that inflamed anti-American sentiment around the globe and was denounced by critics as an illustration of a war gone horribly wrong. The men claimed self-defense, but federal prosecutors argued […]

Featured

Media, Politicians should stop Letting ISIL Manipulate them

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole Ever since George W. Bush invaded Iraq and created the circumstances under which al-Qaeda could take root and flourish there from 2003 forward, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (which later styled itself the “Islamic State of Iraq”) has taken captives and has beheaded them on film. It was doing this in 2004 These acts […]