A quote from Golda Meir has returned to me often over the last four years: "We can forgive you for killing our sons, but we will never forgive you for making us kill yours." Golda apparently said that to Anwar Saddat midway through her term as Prime Minister of Israel, and I think it's the most wonderful thing I've ever heard. It's the kind of quote you can carry through your day in an America at war, and get gradually convinced that, just maybe, you are on the side of history; that maybe there is some kind of overriding, benevolent morality that can survive the endless barrage of bad news of needless deaths and military fuckups and thirteenth-century minds wielding 21st-century weapons. When your allies can say things of such bottomless humanity, and when you know your opponents cannot, it calms the nerves even as everything else conspires to... More >>>