Iraqi Soccer Team
Sports Illustrated has a very interesting article about the anger of the Iraqi soccer team at President Bush for referring to them in his campaign advertisements. While certainly the Iraqi success at the Olympics has been heartwarming (notwithstanding the marginal nature of Olympic soccer), and certainly life for an Iraqi soccer player, at least, is better under at the moment than it was under Uday Hussein, the most telling thing is the statement made by one of the players that if he was not playing soccer, he would be one of the insurgents in Fallujah.
I think this really gets at the heart of the problem with President Bush’s current black-and-white, good-and-evil foreign policy approach: the world is one big shade of gray. The President himself essentially hails this person as a symbol of goodness, but he would just as soon be a guntoting "evil terrorist" in Fallujah if he weren’t playing soccer.
Good or evil? Neither. No one is all good or all evil, even if you only had one moralistic reference point, which we don’t. Trying to categorize the world as good and evil is futile, and blinds us to the true root causes of the events that shape the world.