You don't protect freedom by confiscating it

By Paul Wells - Friday, November 26, 2010 - 90 Comments

What an excellent column in this morning’s New York Times by Roger Cohen, the paper’s only foreign-affairs columnist who can still surprise readers with his choice of topic or improve their day with the elegance of his prose. (Was that a dig at the others? Why yes it was.) The topic is airport scanners and pat-downs. Cohen makes his own points best, but to sum up, he says they’re (1) humiliating; (2) counterproductive; (3) precisely what the terrorists wanted, beyond the immediate slaughter: to hobble the enemy for the very long term.

There’s been a debate around Ottawa about whether Michael Ignatieff was serious this week when he was scrummed about these issues. All I know is, he missed a chance to make these arguments, so by my lights he was about as serious as John Baird ever gets.

History's hinges

By Paul Wells - Monday, November 2, 2009 at 2:30 PM - 12 Comments

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.

Also more than worth your time: the best account I’ve read this week of how it all happened, 20 years ago, in capitals across Europe. From Der Spiegel, which is damned good at this sort of thing.
The weekend's must read

By Paul Wells - Sunday, August 2, 2009 at 7:16 PM - 8 Comments

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.
Not velvet, but revolution

By Paul Wells - Saturday, June 20, 2009 at 6:04 PM - 54 Comments

As soon as you know how the story will end, simply knowing speeds the end’s arrival. Only five years passed between Lincoln’s House Divided speech and the Emancipation Proclamation. Gorbachev told his wife in 1986: “We can’t go on like this.” On Friday — yesterday — Ali Khamanei used Friday prayers to deliver a harangue against his own people, telling them to ignore logic and the evidence of their own hearts, to accept the sham election, and to go home and live in the dark for yet another few more years.

And he put all the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic itself behind his demand.

Big mistake. Continue…