Condi's Party Starter.(The Talk of the Town)(Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East)

At the age of twenty-five, Henry Kissinger was a war-delayed sophomore at Harvard, Madeleine Albright had just begun her Ph.D., James Baker was in law school, and Condoleezza Rice was a graduate student at the University of Denver. One of Rice's recent hires, however, seems to be in a big hurry to get on with the diplomacy. A year ago, Jared Cohen, who was born in 1981, joined the State Department's Policy Planning Staff as its youngest member. Having completed a degree at Stanford, won a Rhodes Scholarship, and earned a master's in international relations at Oxford, Cohen helps advise the State Department on "counter-radicalization," youth, and education, with a special emphasis on the Muslim world. Last week, Penguin published Cohen's book--his second--"Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East."

"When we talk about the people of the Islamic world, the irony is that the majority of those people--sixty per cent--are under the age of thirty," Cohen said recently, over a tuna steak at an Upper East Side restaurant. A former soccer player, with lightly moussed hair, he wore jeans, a blue shirt, and a herringbone jacket. He continued, "I always say that the largest party in every country--the largest opposition group in every country--is the youth party."

Before his State Department days, while he was still a graduate student at Oxford, Cohen talked his way into a visa for Iran, where he hoped to interview members of the political resistance. Instead, he made friends his own age, while being dogged by a full-time official "tour guide," whom he and his new companions nicknamed Ayatollah Assahola. (He is quick to point out that "if one didn't know the context in which I was making those jokes, with friends, it might come across the wrong way.") At night, his friends helped him evade his official escort and took him to Tehran's underground house parties. "They make alcohol in their bathtubs and their sinks," Cohen said. "And the drug use--it's really no different from a frat party. You have to pinch yourself and remind yourself that you're in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iranian young people are one of the most pro-American populations in the Middle East. They just don't know who to gravitate around, so young people gravitate around each other. I'll never look at partying the same way."

A fellow Theta Delt from Stanford owned an apartment in Beirut, so, armed with his barely useful classical Arabic (he is fluent in Swahili and conversant in Maa), Cohen went to Lebanon next. He attended wild multisectarian beach parties, debated young members of Hezbollah at McDonald's, ...