Curt Guyette, in Metro Times (Detroit) (Aug. 25, 2004):

Like the history that he teaches, Juan Cole’s emergence as a 21st century media phenomenon is the product of convergence. Geopolitics and technology and professional pursuits have combined to transform a once-obscure university professor into an analyst hundreds of thousands of people are turning to as an alternative source of information regarding the war in Iraq.

There was a time not long ago when the opinion pieces Cole submitted to magazines and newspapers would go unpublished. No one had much interest in the insights being offered by this University of Michigan history professor who made study of the Middle East and its religions his specialty.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, America’s subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the evolution of the Internet have changed all that. Now, instead of specialized journals and books little noticed outside the margins of academia, Cole’s writings can be found on the pages of The Guardian, San Jose Mercury News, and The Nation, and in Web publications such as Salon. He’s featured frequently in the electronic media, appearing on CNN, “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” and National Public Radio.

His Web log, or blog, Informed Comment (juancole.com), has received as many as 250,000 hits a month; last week, the online journal Slate cited it as “a must-read for those interested in the Middle East.” The phone at his Ann Arbor home rings constantly with journalists seeking his expertise. And in April, he testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Juan Cole and his opinions on Iraq have become a hot commodity. On his blog, he draws information daily from a variety of sources, collecting disparate pieces of a complicated puzzle and placing them together to form a coherent picture.

A 51-year-old specialist in Islamic studies who has “lived all over the Muslim world,” Cole began getting peppered with questions from colleagues on various e-mail lists he subscribed to following Sept. 11. As the author of more than a half-dozen books about Middle Eastern religious sects and the region’s social and political movements, he brought a perspective few Westerners could match.

“Because I was familiar with the terrain from which al Qaeda developed,” he says, “people would ask questions about what was going on and I would try to answer them. My answers were thought well of by my colleagues. My responses would get forwarded very widely. Frankly, I began getting fan mail from places like Denmark. Obviously, there was a lot of interest in what I had to say. People were trying to make sense of the situation.”

Cole relates his trajectory in a matter-of-fact way, with no trace of a braggart in his tone.

As Cole points out, e-mails, by nature, are “ephemeral. You send them and they are gone.” And they have a relatively narrow audience.

By the winter of 2001-02, however, blogging as a phenomenon was beginning to take off, and Cole, who describes himself as “very wired,” was there at the start, ready to ride that technological wave as it began to form.

It was, at that point, a “relatively minor sort of thing,” he explains, nothing more than a hobby. The Iraq war came in the spring of 2003, and he began focusing attention on that. Still, his blog remained relatively obscure. That all changed the following year when, following the capture of Saddam, a “huge pilgrimage from Baghdad to the holy city of Karbala took place. There were thousands and thousands of people flagellating themselves and chanting, and the American media and the American public suddenly said, ‘Who are these people?’”

With one of his specialties being the modern history of Shiite Islam, Cole could answer those questions. Because of his presence on the Internet, journalists, for the first time, began to take notice and turned to him and his Web page as a resource.

A flurry of media appearances occurred, and his blog began gaining wider notice. The site, which would get just a few hundred hits each month when first begun, steadily attracted more readers.

Early on in the war, when optimism ran rampant, Cole saw much reason for concern. Able to read several Middle Eastern languages, he was able to monitor news accounts and opinion pieces from the region online, which, along with his previous studies, provided a depth and breadth of insight few others could match.

“This was something I could not have been able to do in 1990, or even 1995,” says Cole about the availability of Middle Eastern news reports on the Internet. “I could get a level of texture and detail that you could never get from the Western press.”

In fact, he contends, from his desk in Ann Arbor he can obtain a “more thorough review of what is going on in Iraq than most observers on the ground.”

By the summer of 2003, Cole had gained a reputation as a “dark pessimist” at a time when many observers were still expecting victorious troops to be greeted with nothing more dangerous than flower bouquets being lobbed at them.

“As time went on, though, I began getting the reputation of being remarkably prescient,” he says....

He worries that offering pointed commentary could damage his academic credibility, but at this point he feels a moral obligation to point out “the very bad foreign policy mistakes” the United States continues to commit.

“The fate of my country is in the balance,” says Cole. “That is more important than objectivity.”

Cole gives the American media mixed marks for its coverage of the war....

It was encouraging to note that the Senate, as well as many archivists, has questions on why Governor Carlin was asked to resign as Archivist of the United States. Hopefully, the Senate Committee will follow through on Senator Levin’s suggestion that the White House be asked specifically about the reasons behind their request for Carlin’s resignation.

My overall impressions of the hearing were that the Committee seemed to find Allen Weinstein very impressive. They were quick to assure him that their questions on the nature of his nomination did not reflect on their opinions of him. Except for Senator Durbin’s questions on the conflict the EO 13233 presents for Weinstein’s commitment to access to records, the questions he received were not difficult and did not press him to make a great statement on any one issue. Several topics were noted in the Senators’ opening statements, but few were actually addressed in their questions to Weinstein. Specifically, the ERA was addressed in only two questions and only to the point of making sure Weinstein did not know anything about the potential vendors for the project, grants were not mentioned at all, and the Presidential Records Act conflict with EO 13233 received the greatest treatment. But, given the six-minute time limit for each Senator, could anything of depth really have been addressed?

As for the candidate himself, is Allen Weinstein a commanding presence? In essence, he is a soft-spoken, older man. He lacks a certain charisma and presence that may be necessary to defend and argue for the needed funding for NARA from Congress. During the hearing he made reference more than once to not having received briefing materials on certain topics, which brings up the question just how well informed is he about the National Archives? It seemed that knowledge he could have gleamed from NARA’s web site, such as information on NARA’s strategic plan and goals, the Electronic Records Archives, and EO 13233, had not been a part of his pre-hearing briefing materials. I was left with the impression that we, first year archives students, may be better informed on these issues from course readings and assignments than the man that could lead NARA. Perhaps, if given more time and asked broader questions, Weinstein’s knowledge on these topics would have become clear. The hearing simply brought Allen Weinstein’s ability to be an inspiring future leader for the National Archives into question.

If David Irving had not decided to sue an obscure American academic and Penguin Books for allegedly defaming him, his reputation as a historian might, at least to the uninformed, have survived a little longer.

He did not have the academic credentials now normally required of professional historians and he was not an academic, but he had over the years won the grudging respect of academics for the stamina and assiduity with which he worked in the archives to produce material not seen before.

Writers as eminent as Sir Winston Churchill's biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, military historian Sir Michael Howard, and Hugh Trevor- Roper, author of the brilliant classic work on the last days of Adolf Hitler, had all been prepared to praise him for the energy with which he conducted his research.

Since the 1960s, Irving has been prolific. He has concentrated on the central figures or events of World War 2, producing large volumes on the bombing of Dresden, and on Goering, Goebbels, Churchill, Rommel and Hitler.

For all his energy, however, there have been doubts from the beginning about the conclusions he drew from his research.

In one of his earliest books, about a British convoy taking supplies to Murmansk in northern Russia during World War 2, he accused a British officer of cowardice leading to the destruction of the convoy.

A court found that this was a gross libel, and awarded damages against him of 40,000, a huge sum at the time.

In the late 1970s, he published Hitler's War, a "revisionist" work which set out to distance Hitler from responsibility for the Jewish Holocaust.

Reviewing it for the London Sunday Times, Hugh Trevor-Roper conceded that the work had some merit, but he crushingly concluded that Irving was not to be trusted.

"We can never quite be sure, and when he is most original, we are least likely to be sure."

He found that Irving wrote with a "consistent bias".

Susanna Rustin, in the Guardian (July 31, 2004):

On November 11 1944, Paul Fussell woke up surrounded by corp-ses. Drafted into the American infantry 18 months before, he had been in France just a few weeks and this was his first night in the line. "Until that moment," he writes in his memoir Doing Battle (1996), "the only dead people I'd seen had been Mother's parents." But now, in the forest where he had been ordered to rest after a botched attack, there were "dozens of German boys in greenish grey uniforms, killed a day or two before by the company we were replacing. If darkness had mercifully hidden them from us, dawn disclosed them with staring open eyes and greenish white faces."

The horrors inflicted by and on ground troops, Fussell believes, are almost never acknowledged. "American readers needed someone to tell them what war was really like," he says, "because by the 1970s the romanticising of the second world war had already begun. And so I tried to cut away parts of it - tell them what a trench smelt like and what dead GIs smelt like and so forth."

For his friend Edmund Keeley, a retired Princeton English professor, Fussell's classic literary study, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), is without question his most important work. In it, he set out his stall, emphasising tactical errors and blunders, drawing the reader's attention to the hordes of terrified, disgusted deserters. He described the everyday texture of life at the front, from freezing cold, rats, lice and terrible food, to horrific mutilations and murders. But what distinguished the book from other critical accounts of the world wars, or of Vietnam, was its literary emphasis. "I think he was the first to see the connection between those various wars and the way they were described and who was doing the describing," says Keeley. "Style, how you use words, how you use rhetoric, can end up being a kind of symbol of how a whole generation is thinking."

Fussell showed that the British were masters of a euphemistic diction whereby, in wartime, friends became "comrades", danger was "peril", to die was "to perish" and the dead were "the fallen" or "the dust". He suggested that to call the killing fields of the Somme a "battle" was "to suggest that these events parallel Blenheim and Waterloo not only in glory but in structure and meaning". In the work of the soldier-poets and memoirists who were the focus of his research, Fussell discovered a series of ironic contrasts. Poppies and roses, symbols of blood and passion spent, were reminders too of a pre-war pastoral idyll. Sunrises and sunsets, moments of ritualised terror in the trenches as soldiers were required to "stand-to", became, in the poems, ripe with moral and religious suggestion....