Stuart Buck on Cole’s response today (mine will be up in a bit):

Jonah Goldberg responded yesterday to Juan Cole via this column. Today, Juan Cole responds in turn. What is most interesting is that while Cole finds the time and space to sneer at Goldberg’s qualifications, sneer at Goldberg’s failure to volunteer personally to fight in Iraq, sneer at various unnamed pundits who claimed that Iraq was “secular,” sneer at the “corporate media,” and to address other irrelevant subjects, Cole never even mentions the fact that he himself once took a seemingly opposite position on the sole substantive issue that started this debate.
That is, just as I point out in the post below, and just as Goldberg discusses extensively, Cole wrote an article last year that (a) gave unparalleled and unqualified praise to Sistani’s plans for the Iraqi election (even to the point of comparing Sistani to Thomas Jefferson), and (b) gave a very unfavorable portrayal of Iran’s lack of democracy (given that the “hard line clerics” both decide who gets to stand for election and then retain most of the real power even after the election). Cole never explains why he has suddenly decided that Iran’s elections are so much more democratic, especially now that the vaunted Sistani was mostly successful in implementing his Jeffersonian plans in Iraq.