It used to be thought, when the candid images were not common, that showing something that needed to be seen, bringing a painful reality closer, was bound to goad viewers to feel more. In a world in which photography is brilliantly at the service of consumerist manipulations, no effect of a photograph of a doleful scene can be taken for granted.

To the militant, identity is everything.

The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying.

Hakkın ve haklılığın bir tarafta, baskı ve adaletsizliğin diğer tarafta yer aldığına ve kavganın sürdürülmesi gerektiğine inananlar açısından önemli olan, tam da kimin, kim tarafından öldürüldüğüdür.

War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.

War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the net result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and cultural ruin of the entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas, one thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon.

Enemies are somewhere else, as the fighting is almost always “over there,” with Islamic fundamentalism now replacing Russian and Chinese communism as the implacable, furtive menace. And “terrorist” is a more flexible word than “communist.” It can unify a larger number of quite different struggles and interests. What this may mean is that the war will be endless---since there will always be some terrorism.