A Year of Conflict

From the huddled refugee camps of the West Bank to the backpackers' paradise in Bali, violence and conflict erupted along an arc of crisis. American soldiers, high tech and supermodern, raced into battle in Afghanistan; in the West Bank and Kashmir, women grieved for their dead with gestures and cries as old as the ages. Innocents suffered, as always: bystanders killed by bombs in Israel; a journalist murdered for no reasons other than that he was an American, a Jew and a reporter. In the suburbs of Washington, a pair of snipers stalked their victims, hiding behind trees, tucked among the vehicles in a parking lot, rendering violence banal--but no less cruel than it was anywhere else.