Roger Cohen

Scanners and pat-downs are humiliating and counterproductive

Roger Cohen, in the New York Times, wonders whether Tehran this year, or Tiananmen 20 years ago, could have worked out the way a dozen popular uprisings ended across Central Europe in that miraculous autumn of 1989 did: with the good guys winning. He draws no hard conclusions — he’s musing aloud, not browbeating his readers — but it’s a thoughtful and typically eloquent piece by the columnist who is, this year, consistently running rings around other U.S. foreign-policy writers.

Roger Cohen puts everything he’s seen and heard during an extraordinary year covering Iran’s elections, and the challenges they pose for U.S. foreign policy, into one long, measured, fair, gorgeously written Sunday New York Times Magazine article. Even for one of the Times‘s leading correspondents and columnists, this has to count as career-topping work.

Paul Wells on Iran: Choices force more choices, and events force events. This business did not start out as a people’s revolt.