Juan Cole

Generally speaking, Cole approaches the Middle East and Western Asia from the point of view of anti-imperialism. Viewing the USA as a colonialist power, he sees it as defending the post-World War I "Sykes–Picot/Balfour architecture" (described as "a colossal failure") against Arab nationalist or pan-Islamic challengers. These foundered for various reasons, especially "particularism". The U.S., like previous empires, seeks to take advantage of such internal rivalries in order to "divide and rule". Terrorism, he explains (after comparing several countries in the region), is the result of foreign occupation in combination with weak states.

After September 11, Cole founded the Global Americana Institute to translate works concerning the United States into Arabic. The first volume was selected works of Thomas Jefferson, translated for the first time into Arabic, and the second is a translation of a biography of Martin Luther King Jr. along with selected speeches and writings (scheduled for fall 2012). The Institute is partnering with Dar al-Saqi books in this series. Cole has successfully solicited contributions through his website to support the translations and publications.

Cole supported the NATO-led 2011 military intervention in Libya, which he described as "the UNSC-authorized intervention", and criticized those on the left who did not. When Cole was asked in 2015 how he felt about the results of the intervention, he said, "It wasn't an intervention, it was a revolution. Revolutions are messy. It turned out better than Syria, where there wasn't a significant intervention."

In 2011, James Risen reported in The New York Times that Glenn Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, "said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information" on Cole "in order to discredit him". "In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted 'to get' Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a CIA official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful."

Among Cole's major academic specializations has been the history of modern Egypt, including Sunni Islam. His second monograph was on the nineteenth-century 'Urabi Revolt, and his fifth was on the French invasion and occupation of the country under Napoleon. Egypt was one focus of his Engaging the Muslim World (Palgrave, 2009). He has authored nearly a dozen major journal articles and book chapters on Egypt.

On the nuclear issue, Cole wrote in 2007 that "Iran is a good ten years away from having a bomb," and points out that Ali Khamenei and other leaders have condemned nuclear weapons as un-Islamic. Cole also dismissed the Bush administration's allegation that Iran has supported terrorism in Iraq or Afghanistan, arguing rather that the United States had lent support to anti-Iranian terrorist groups such as the Kurdistan Free Life Party.

The blog has won various awards; as of April 2006 the most prominent is the 2005 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism from Hunter College. It has also received two 2004 Koufax Awards: the "Best Expert Blog" and the "Best Blog Post". It has since dropped off the list, but Informed Comment has been ranked as the 99th most popular blog on the Internet by Technorati on October 21, 2006. Cole was a strong critic of the George W. Bush administration and is one of the most respected foreign policy commentators amongst left-wing bloggers.

The July 28, 2006 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education featured a story on Cole's blog and its role in his career. Following essays by several academic bloggers, Cole was given a chance to respond to the question of whether academics should risk career advancement by blogging. He responded:

As of 2006, there were "less than 1000" foreign (i.e., genuine) al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq, although the Bush administration's actions have caused increasing numbers of Iraqi Sunnis to sympathize or identify with that organization. Such native sympathizers are referred to on his blog as "Salafi jihadis". Cole dismissed as "implausible" the prospect of such groups taking over Iraq.

During the 2006 Lebanon War, Cole accused both sides of committing "war crimes" against civilians. Cole stated that "[Israel has] every right to defend itself against Nasrallah and his mad bombers" while voicing disapproval for the "wholesale indiscriminate destruction and slaughter in which the Israelis have been engaged against the Lebanese in general". Cole also accused Israel of having planned the operation as much as a year in advance, rather than simply responding to provocation.

In 2006, Cole was nominated to teach at Yale University and was approved by both Yale's sociology and history departments. However, the senior appointments committee overruled the departments, and Cole was not appointed.

Cole blamed the George W. Bush administration for creating what he calls a "failed state" in Iraq. He particularly cites its decision to disband the Iraqi Army, its treatment of prisoners, its alienation of neighboring countries, its corrupt economic policies, and long delays in organizing elections and forming a (weak) government. Bush's decision to invade Iraq, Cole wrote in 2005, resulted from a "coalition of disparate forces" within the Bush administration, "each with its own rationale" for going to war. He identifies: Bush's own "obsession with restoring family honor" slighted by Saddam Hussein's remaining in power after the Gulf War; Dick Cheney's interest in benefits to the oil industry (he cites "billions in no-bid contracts for [Halliburton]"—of which Cheney was CEO in the 1990s—and which "saved Halliburton from bankruptcy"); Cheney's "Manichaean, Cold War-inspired worldview—in which the U.S. battled an evil enemy"; Evangelical Christians who "wanted to missionize Iraq"; Karl Rove's wanting to "turn Bush into a war president" to ensure re-election; and neo-conservatives who hoped to transform the Middle East and remove what they perceived as a danger to Israel. The Bush administration's focus on purported weapons of mass destruction, he added, was an attempt to find a rationale acceptable to the public.

Cole's journalism is mainly in the form of commentary than reporting. From 2004 to 2009, Cole had a regular column at Salon. Since 2009, he has written semi-regularly for Truthdig and Tom Engelhardt's Tomdispatch.com.

In 2004, the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations requested Cole's testimony at hearings to better understand the situation in Iraq.

Cole, who began to call the Iraqi conflict a "civil war" as early as 2004, in 2007 stated that it consists of three distinct wars: "for control of Basra among Shiite militiamen; for control of Baghdad and its hinterlands between Sunnis and Shiites; and for control of Kirkuk among Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen."

Cole supported the reformist president Mohammad Khatami and rued his succession by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He reports that in 2003, Iran (addressing the Bush administration through the Swiss embassy) proposed a comprehensive peace agreement, which Bush refused even to discuss. He wrote of Ahmadinejad in 2007: "I profoundly disagree with his characterization of Israel, which is a legitimate United Nations member state". He also considers Ahmadinejad's holocaust denial to be "monstrous". Cole viewed the 2009 Iranian presidential election as having been stolen by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Cole was asked to address the pros and cons of the building war against Iraq in January 2003 for the journal of the University of Michigan International Institute. He wrote that any invasion of Iraq would inevitably be rejected by Iraqis and the Arab world as a form of neocolonialism. According to Cole: "The Sunnis of Iraq could well turn to groups like al-Qaida, having lost the ideals of the Baath. Iraqi Shi'ites might become easier to recruit into Khomeinism of the Iranian sort, and become a bulwark for the shaky regime in Shi'ite Iran." Considering the problem of ethnic politics, he commented, "A post-war Iraq may well be riven with factionalism that impedes the development of a well-ensconced new government." He rejected the argument that Baathist Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" or backing of terrorism posed threats to the United States. Cole admitted that he had had "mixed feelings" on the issue—i.e., he opposed Saddam Hussein's regime, but feared disaster and opposed international illegality. He was insistent that any war would be illegal without a UN Security Council resolution (which was not obtained by the Bush administration). His position on the war resembled that of the French government, which is generally held to have opposed it. By January 2003, he said he had become "cynical" about the Bush administration motives for the war. On the day of the U.S. invasion, Cole wrote that "for all the concerns one might have about the aftermath, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the murderous Baath regime from power will be worth the sacrifices that are about to be made on all sides." He has explained that this posting was not intended to show support for the invasion: "The passage quoted ... was not about whether the war was legal or not. Being from a military family, it mattered to me as an ethical issue whether troops lives were being lost for no good reason, in an illegal boondoggle. I decided on careful deliberation that even though the war was wrong, the lives lost would not be in vain, since a tyrannical regime would have fallen. To say that some good could come of an illegal act is not to endorse the illegal act."

From 2002 onwards, Cole became a widely recognized public intellectual. Foreign Policy commented in 2004, "Cole's transformation into a public intellectual embodies many of the dynamics that have heightened the impact of the blogosphere. He wanted to publicize his expertise, and he did so by attracting attention from elite members of the blogosphere. As Cole made waves within the virtual world, others in the real world began to take notice".

Since 2002, Cole has published the blog Informed Comment, covering "History, Middle East, South Asia, Religious Studies, and the War on Terror". Blog entries include comments on widely reported articles in Western media, summaries of important articles from Arabic and Israeli news sources, and letters and discussions with both critics and supporters.

After September 11, 2001, Cole turned increasingly to writing on radical Muslim movements, the Iraq War, United States foreign policy, and the Iran crisis. His scholarship was influenced by his blog, "Informed Comment", founded in 2002. He has pioneered in the field of what he calls not "contemporary history" but "current affairs history". See also "The Case for Current Affairs History"

Cole was occasionally cited in the press as a Middle East expert in the 1990s. He became much more prominent after 2002, when he began publishing his weblog.

Cole married Shahin Malik in Lahore in 1982. The couple has a son, Arman, born in 1987.

Cole was awarded Fulbright-Hays fellowships to India (1982) and to Egypt (1985–1986). In 1991 he held a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for the study of Shia Islam in Iran. From 1999 until 2004, Juan Cole was the editor of The International Journal of Middle East Studies. He has served in professional offices for the American Institute of Iranian Studies and on the editorial board of the journal Iranian Studies. He is a member of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, and served as the organization's president for 2006. In 2006, he received the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism administered by Hunter College.

Cole obtained his undergraduate degree at Northwestern University in 1975, having majored in History and Literature of Religions. For two quarters in his senior year he conducted a research project in Beirut, Lebanon and returned to the city as a graduate student in the fall of 1975, but the civil war prevented Cole from continuing his studies there. Therefore, he pursued a master's degree at the American University in Cairo in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, graduating in 1978. Cole then returned to Beirut for another year and worked as a translator for a newspaper. In 1979, Cole enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles as a doctoral student in the field of Islamic Studies, graduating in 1984. After graduation, Cole was appointed Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan where he became a full professor in 1995.

Cole lived in Beirut for several years, and was present for part of the 1975–1976 civil war. His overview of 20th century Lebanese history blames the CIA for rigging elections there in 1957, in order to allow president Camille Chamoun a second term. (Chamoun had apparently persuaded Dwight D. Eisenhower that the Druze leaned towards Communism.) This had the effect of forcing pro-Nasser Arab nationalists outside the political process. Cole additionally blames the influx of 100,000 Palestinian refugees in 1948—and the various later military actions against them by Syria and Israel—for the condition of Lebanese politics today.

Cole converted to the Bahá'í Faith in 1972, but later resigned in 1996 after conflicts with members of the Bahá'í administration who perceived him as extreme and threatened him with a Bahá'í version of excommunication. Cole went on to critically attack the Bahá'í Faith in several books and articles written from 1998-2000, describing a prominent Bahá'í as "inquisitor" and "bigot", and describing Bahá'í institutions as socially isolating, dictatorial, and controlling, and with financial irregularities.

Cole mastered Persian in the 1970s and 1980s and has written academically on Iran's early modern and modern history, including the Qajar period and the Islamic Republic from 1979.

Cole is from a mixed Catholic and Protestant heritage, but was brought up a non-denominational Protestant on army bases. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, he became interested in Eastern religions, including Buddhism. Cole became a member of the Bahá'í Faith in 1972 as an undergraduate at Northwestern, and the religion later became a focus of his academic research. He resigned from the faith in 1996 after disputes with Bahá'í leadership concerning the Bahá'í system of administration, particularly the requirement to review works by Bahá'í authors when writing about the religion. He later became uninterested in organized religion as a personal matter.

Cole tends to value multinational (and especially UN) initiatives over unilateral military ones. He favors multi-ethnic states over separatist movements. Given his background in the 1960s and 1970s religious counter-culture, he views Islam (along with other religions) as essentially good, but distorted by certain of its political appropriators (and critics).

John Ricardo I. "Juan" Cole (born October 23, 1952) is an American academic and commentator on the modern Middle East and South Asia. He is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Since 2002, he has written a weblog, Informed Comment (juancole.com).

Kahlil Gibran is a well-known Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and artist who wrote in Arabic as well as English. Cole has translated three volumes of his Arabic-language literary writings. One of these, Broken Wings (al-Ajnihah al-Mutakassira, 1912), is alleged to have been the first Arabic-language novel, and has early feminist themes, protesting against arranged marriage and religious corruption.