Roger Cohen's Slant

WASHINGTON — When an officer was commended to his attention, Napoleon is reported to have inquired: “Is he lucky?” Luck is half the game. It’s no good having it and being incapable of using it. On the other hand, great striving may come to naught without luck. My sense is that Presid .. submitted 05/21/12

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LONDON — Watching Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi do his Caligula thing in the ruins of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, and reading about his son’s St. Barts fests with Beyonc?, I confess that disgust yielded to nausea: enough is enough. There are as many versions of curre .. submitted 05/21/12

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LONDON — It says something about the miserable European response to the Arab spring that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s personal contribution to North African affairs — his alleged liaison with a then-17-year-old Moroccan dancer — only just takes the prize for most abject perform .. submitted 05/21/12

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CAIRO — The sea of people pulsated with energy, galvanized by the words of Wael Ghonim, the young Google executive who got the Mubarak treatment — 12-day disappearance, blindfolding, interrogation — before a tweet that will one day be etched in some granite memorial: “Freedom is a bless that .. submitted 05/21/12

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CAIRO — The core issue in Egypt can be boiled down to this: are we witnessing Tehran 1979 or Berlin 1989? Is this a broad uprising against dictatorship whose goal of democratic freedom will be usurped by organized Islamists, as in the Iranian revolution? Or is this the end of the Arab Jura .. submitted 05/21/12

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SIDI BOUZID, TUNISIA — This is where an Arab revolution began, in a hardscrabble stretch of nowhere. If the modern world is divided into dynamic hubs and a static periphery, Sidi Bouzid epitomizes the latter. The town never even appeared on the national weather forecast. The spark was an a .. submitted 05/21/12

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TUNIS — Liberated Tunisia has done away with its Ministry of Communications, really the Ministry of Censorship, and also seems to have dispensed with all but the most cursory immigration controls, to judge by the relaxed, wave-you-on-your-way scene at the airport. These are heady days in the Arab .. submitted 05/21/12

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LONDON — Is Tunis the Arab Gdansk? Big things start small. In Poland, the firing in 1980 of Anna Walentynowicz, a shipyard worker, led to strikes and the formation of the grassroots Solidarity movement that set in motion the unraveling of the Soviet empire. Walentynowicz, who was killed in a plane .. submitted 05/21/12

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NEW YORK — Let’s hear it for the men and women of the U.S. Foreign Service! They are, to judge from the WikiLeaks dump of a quarter-million of their private or secret cables, thoughtful, well-informed and dedicated servants of the American interest who write clear, declarative E .. submitted 05/21/12

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LONDON — The full-body scanners and intrusive pat-downs that are fast becoming the norm at U.S. airports — just in time for Thanksgiving! — do at least provide the answer to what should be done with Osama bin Laden if he’s ever captured: Rotate him in perpetuity through this .. submitted 05/21/12

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I was among the early and strong supporters of Barack Obama. America was stuck and it seemed to me he could take the country forward into the 21st century, which began so tragically in downtown New York and here in the nation’s capital. Like many, at midterm, I’m struggling with my disap .. submitted 05/21/12

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The “animal spirits” of which Keynes spoke are on the prowl across the United States. Their mood is ugly. The spirits are wary and troubled. Corporations and individuals are hoarding cash, when they have any, because they’re not buying into the recovery. submitted 05/21/12

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TROY, New York — The Dogans were a quiet family little noticed by their neighbors here in upstate New York. Ahmet Dogan had come to the area from Turkey to study accounting at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was a serious student; the Dogans did little entertaining. But when their younge .. submitted 05/21/12

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