In war, as in life, there are plenty of opportunities to see the full spectrum of good and evil that people are capable of. As journalists, it is our job is to report both - though neither may be fully representative of those people on whom we're reporting.
...
I interviewed your commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Willy Buhl, before the battle for Falluja began. He said something very powerful at the time - something that now seems prophetic. It was this:

"We're the good guys. We are Americans. We are fighting a gentleman's war here - because we don't behead people, we don't come down to the same level of the people we're combating.

"That's a very difficult thing for a young 18-year-old marine who's been trained to locate, close with and destroy the enemy with fire and close combat. That's a very difficult thing for a 42-year-old lieutenant colonel with 23 years experience in the service who was trained to do the same thing once upon a time, and who now has a thousand-plus men to lead, guide, coach, mentor - and ensure we remain the good guys and keep the moral high ground." I listened carefully when he said those words. I believed them.

So here, ultimately, is how it all plays out: when the Iraqi man in the mosque posed a threat, he was your enemy; when he was subdued he was your responsibility; when he was killed in front of my eyes and my camera - the story of his death became my responsibility.

Guardian | 'Something was not right': "Other foreign networks made different decisions, and because of that, I
have become the conflicted conduit who has brought this to the world."

The "strong opposition" in North Korea? Maybe not strong at all.

Print - North Korea: Joyful Dancing - DER SPIEGEL - SPIEGEL ONLINE: "The people of North Korea are not as submissive as they appear to be. Unnoticed by the outside world, strong opposition to the regime of dictator Kim Jong Il is beginning to appear. "

Scientific research, like other cooperative endeavors, requires trust to flourish. The distinguished philosopher Annette Baier explains that trust is confident reliance.1 Both elements, confidence and reliance, are vital.
Physics Today November 2004- Trust and the Future of Research

It may be a piece of positive-negative mixed message. Maybe this kind of news of Iraq is what Mr. Allawi wants, like he told Jim Lehrer on PBS today.

Hope Amid the Rubble
By PETER BERGEN

Washington

Based on what Americans have been seeing in the news media about Afghanistan lately, there may not be many who believed President Bush on Tuesday when he told the United Nations that the "Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom." But then again, not many Americans know what Afghanistan was like before the American-led invasion. Let me offer some perspective.

This summer I visited Kandahar, the former Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan, for the first time since the winter of 1999. Five years ago, the Taliban and its Al Qaeda allies were at the height of their power. They had turned Afghanistan into a terrorist state, with more than a dozen training camps churning out thousands of jihadist graduates every year.

The scene was very different this time around. The Kandahar airport, where I had once seen Taliban soldiers showing off their antiaircraft missiles, is now a vast American base with thousands of soldiers, as well as a 24-hour coffee shop, a North Face clothing store, a day spa and a PX the size of a Wal-Mart. Next door, what was once a base for Osama bin Laden is now an American shooting range. In downtown Kandahar, the gaudy compound of the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, now houses United States Special Forces units.

As I toured other parts of the country, the image that I was prepared for - that of a nation wracked by competing warlords and in danger of degenerating into a Colombia-style narcostate - never materialized. Undeniably, the drug trade is a serious concern (it now compromises about a third of the country's gross domestic product) and the slow pace of disarming the warlords is worrisome.

Over the last three years, however, most of the important militia leaders, like Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum of the Uzbek community in the country's north, have shed their battle fatigues for the business attire of the politicians they hope to become. It's also promising that some three million refugees have returned to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. Kabul, the capital, is now one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, with spectacular traffic jams and booming construction sites. And urban centers around the country are experiencing similar growth.

While two out of three Afghans cited security as their most pressing concern in a poll taken this summer by the International Republican Institute, four out of five respondents also said things are better than they were two years ago. Despite dire predictions from many Westerners, the presidential election, scheduled for Oct. 9, now looks promising. Ten million Afghans have registered to vote, far more than were anticipated, and almost half of those who have signed up are women. Indeed, one of the 18 candidates for president is a woman. Even in Kandahar, more then 60 percent of the population has registered to vote, while 45 percent have registered in Uruzgan Province, the birthplace of Mullah Omar. With these kinds of numbers registering, it seems possible that turnout will be higher than the one-third of eligible voters who have participated in recent American presidential elections.

According to a poll taken in July by the Asia Foundation, President Hamid Karzai is drawing substantial support around the country. He has emerged not only as a popular leader, but also as a shrewd player of the kind of hardball politics that would have warmed the heart of Lyndon Johnson. This summer he dropped his running mate, Mohammad Fahim, a power-hungry general who had pompously awarded himself the title of field marshal after the fall of the Taliban. And this month Mr. Karzai forced Ismail Khan, the governor of the western province of Herat, to resign. These moves not only neutralized two powerful rivals, men who could field their own private armies, but also increased the stability of the central government.

What we are seeing in Afghanistan is far from perfect, but it's better than so-so. Disputes that would once have been settled with the barrel of a gun are now increasingly being dealt with politically. The remnants of the Taliban are doing what they can to disrupt the coming election, but their attacks, aimed at election officials, American forces and international aid workers, are sporadic and strategically ineffective.

If the elections are a success, it will send a powerful signal to neighboring countries like Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, none of which can claim to be representative democracies. If so, the democratic domino effect, which was one of the Bush administration's arguments for the Iraq war, may be more realistic in Central Asia than it has proved to be in the Middle East.


Peter Bergen is a fellow at the New America Foundation and an adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

READ MORE

... the extension of democracy throughout the world carries the seeds (if by no means the certainty) of mass murder.
The Chronicle: 9/17/2004: Delving Into Democracy's Shadows

The irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight. There may be good arguments against gay marriage, partial-birth abortions and human cloning, but the fact that some people find such acts to be disgusting should carry no weight.
Guardian Unlimited | Life | To urgh is human: "The irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight. There may be good arguments against gay marriage, partial-birth abortions and human cloning, but the fact that some people find such acts to be disgusting should carry no weight"

"I had a one-in-four-thousand chance of dying," Kravinsky says. "But my recipient had a certain death facing her. I'd be valuing my life at four thousand times hers if I let consideration of mortality sway me." The young woman who got Kravinsky's kidney, a twenty-nine-year-old African-American, tells Parker, "It was so surreal. You're going about your life, and then you get this phone call.... It was such an overwhelming thing, such an awesome thing, I wanted to meditate on it on my own." When Kravinsky went home, four days after his kidney was removed, Parker reports, "he was wondering if he should give away his other kidney"—and live on dialysis. [...] Through it all, Kravinsky has kept up his intense scrutiny of what makes a life worth living. "It isn't that I think people are evil" for not acting altruistically, he says. "But it's a fact that our actions, in some sense our thoughts, let some people live and some people die."

There is also a brief interview with Mr. Kravinsky at CNN:
CNN.com: Kravinsky Transcript

Here is another profile for the Associated Press:
SF Gate: Zell Kravinsky