Most of the Iraq chapter of Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World will be nothing new to regular readers of his blog. The first part surveys different views of the war in the United States and the Arab world. In the U.S., the war is sold through “Islam Anxiety,” which Cole uses throughout [...]
|
|||||
|
Iran’s President Mahmood Ahmadinejad has called for the arrest of reformist leaders: “Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has called for opposition leaders to be punished over the unrest sparked by his disputed election victory… “The call came in a speech to a crowd of thousands before Friday Prayers in Tehran… “Hard-liners have in recent weeks called for [...] Andrew Sullivan is right: The document reads, like so much else from the Cheney years, like a document from a South American dictatorship in the 1970s or 1980s. If someone had told me a few years ago that it had popped up in the Soviet archives, I would have believed him. Read the whole thing if [...] Just as the death of Edward Kennedy marks the passing of one of the most prominent politicians in the American political firmament, today the Iraqi political scene lost one of its key figures as well. Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of one of Iraq’s main Shiite political parties, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), succumbed [...] From Christopher Davidson’s new book Abu Dhabi: Oil and Beyond: “Early in (2008) it was revealed by the BBC that several hundred UAE Armed Forces’ troops and armoured cars had been deployed to Afghanistan to maintain supply line security and deliver humanitarian aid. On occasion this contingent has had to fend off Taleban attacks thus making [...] In reading the third and shortest chapter of Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World, “The Wahhabi Myth: From Riyadh to Doha,” I was struck by something that wasn’t there. The point of this chapter is that Wahhabism does not cause terrorism, nor is Saudi Arabia the main exporter of anti-American violence in the region. [...] While President Bush was still in office and his administration was trying to come to an agreement with the Iraqi government on terms governing the continued troop presence in Iraq (what is referred to as the Status of Forces Agreement, or “SOFA”), Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani made a public statement demanding that any such agreement [...] |
Blake Hounshell (aka praktike), our co-founder and main man, is now managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine. 
|
||||
|
American Footprints 123 queries. 1.388 seconds. |
|||||
Recent Comments