where in his blog entry do you see that he portrays Franks wanting a military takeover? He explicity states in the first graph, which I included, that he (Cole) is not saying the he (Franks) is advocating this, but calls it the height of irresponsibility for a man in his position to broach this as an issue which is then not defended against by this man who is suppposedly charged with defending the Constitution.
I know the Franks interview comes from Cigar Afficianado. I have a hard copy of it. I also know that most all bloggers/etc have picked up the NewsMax story, including Eschaton and many, many posters here on this site.
Cole comments on the ideological bent of the military, Franks included, as a cause for concern. I don't see where you get that he's accusing Franks from the content of Cole's blog.
Again, Cole writes on the subject of Middle Eastern politics, including books. He has articles in the recent Boston Review and a journal whose exact name escapes me...middle eastern review or politics.
Are you suggesting that Cole, who is considered an expert on the area, is less informed than you are, or less reliable?
His blog is also cited by Riverbend, a native and current resident of Iraq, who seems to think he knows what he's talking about.
If you would like to know his sources, you can certainly find them cited in such places.
Here's one of them to get you going-
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR28.5/cole.html The Iraqi Shiites
On the history of America’s would-be allies
Juan Cole
8 The ambitious aim of the American war in Iraq—articulated by Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and other neoconservative defense intellectuals—was to effect a fundamental transformation in Middle East politics. The war was not—or not principally—about finding weapons of mass destruction, or preventing alliances with al Qaeda, or protecting the Iraqi population from Saddam’s terror. For U.S. policy makers the importance of such a transformation was brought home by the events of September 11, which challenged U.S. strategy in the region by compromising the longstanding U.S. alliance with Saudi Wahhabis. In response to this challenge, the Bush administration saw the possibility of creating a new pillar for U.S. policy in the region: a post-Baathist Iraq, dominated by Iraqi Shiites, which would spark a wave of democratization across the Middle East.
But the Bush administration badly neglected the history of the group they wanted to claim as their new ally. Who are the Iraqi Shiites? And how likely are they to support democracy or U.S. goals in the region? To address these questions, we will first need some background.
Anti-Communism and the Pillars of U.S. Policy
From 1970 until the end of the Cold War, U.S. policy in the Middle East was based on three principles and two key alliances.. The principles included fighting against Communist and other radical anti-American influences; supporting conservative religious and authoritarian political elites; and ensuring access to Middle Eastern petroleum supplies. The two principal allies were Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The centrality of the anti-Soviet pillar to regional policy is often ignored, but it helps explain the others. Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy, was a crucial pivot of U.S. policy from the 1970s forward. U.S. officials viewed its deeply conservative Wahhabi form of Islam as a barricade against Communism and—after the 1979 Iranian Revolution—against Iran’s Shiite Khomeinism. Israel, too, battled leftist and pro-Soviet forces, though its determination to annex much or all of the territories it captured in 1967 made it a problematic partner for a United States seeking Arab friends. The United States could maintain an alliance with both the Zionist state and the Wahhabi kingdom, even though the two did not care very much for one another, because both disliked the Soviets and leftist Palestinians.
...more