Understanding the Middle East: an interview with Juan Cole.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh
• Position: Interview

Juan Cole is a prominent and prolific commentator on international affairs. A professor at the University of Michigan, he has written a number of highly acclaimed books on the Middle East and South Asia.

But it is through his blog, Informed Comment, that Cole has made himself well heard. Launched in 2002, it has acquired a large following. He has become a frequent guest on television and radio and is published regularly in a range of media outlets.

Cole's prominence and outspokenness has also attracted some undesired attention. The Bush Administration spied on Cole. And Yale University denied him an appointment even after he had been approved by its history and sociology departments.

Cole spent a portion of his childhood in what is now Eritrea (then a part of Ethiopia). After obtaining his undergraduate degree from Northwestern University, he went to Beirut for graduate work but had to leave when the Lebanese civil war broke out. Instead, he got a master's from the American University in Cairo and then a Ph.D. from UCLA. Cole is fluent in a number of Middle Eastern and South Asian languages, and knows French, German, and Spanish.

I met Cole on campus in Ann Arbor. After lunch at a restaurant near the university, we retired to his office, where we spoke about his life and work, the Middle East, the upcoming presidential elections, and what it felt like to be a target of the Bush Administration.

Q: Your blog is a must-read for anyone interested in international issues. How did you get it started?

Cole: After 9/11, I got drawn into being a public intellectual, just because I had lived in Egypt and Pakistan and had followed Pakistan-Afghanistan politics and Middle Eastern politics for twenty years. I had kept an eye on Al Qaeda--I knew what it was and knew something about its history.

People started asking me questions, especially on e-mail round robins I participated in. I tried to answer them, and the answers became quite popular. I began archiving them on a website in the spring of 2002. Over time, I developed a small readership. But then, the Bush Administration decided to invade Iraq. It so happened that I had written academic journal articles about Iraq. I was one of the few Americans who had taken an interest in that subject.

After the fall of the Saddam Hussein government, the Shiites came out and did their processions. Some of the clerics, like Muqtada al-Sadr, started mobilizing. Journalists in the United States were puzzled. I started writing things on the web on all this, and they went viral on me. I got invitations to come on TV--PBS NewsHour, even Fox News. I became the go-to person, especially for Iraqi Shiite affairs, but also Iraqi politics in general.

The Iraq War, the war on terror--these were rightwing narratives. If the right was able to get them into play, typically it was an advantage for them politically, whereas I had a left-of-center take. I can't tell you how grateful the American left was for my point of view on it. But many conservatives also linked to my blog just because they felt the information was good. The hits started taking off. In the spring of 2004, that April when the United States was fighting the Mahdi Army in Iraq, I had a million page views. I had never had a million of anything.

Q: In a perverse way, the Bush Administration acknowledged your influence by spying on you.

Cole: During the Bush era, news about my appearances in Washington annoyed somebody in the White House, probably someone on the National Security Council. That person at some point, probably in late 2005, contacted...