Hold your fire.

This article seems to be about web sites that track martyr deaths in Iraq. To be honest, I didn't read it all, but there was this part...

On April 11, he died as a suicide bomber, part of a coordinated insurgent attack on a U.S. Marine base in the western Iraq city of Qaim. Just two days later, "the Martyrdom" of Hadi bin Mubarak Qahtani was announced on the Internet, the latest requiem for a young Saudi man who had clamored to follow "those 19 heroes" of Sept. 11 and had found in Iraq an accessible way to die.

It made me think that there will be no lasting peace until war is long gone. Everyone who's been through some atrocity must have passed from this Earth. As long as there's someone who's experienced a September 11 or a March 11 or a July 7, there's someone potentially willing to create another one. That radicals create more radicals is not a new idea, but I never looked at it from the other direction.

Perhaps it's optimistic to think that our violent problems are over when the last victim of violence dies. There will still be people angry about the holocaust after the people who witnessed it are gone. There are people who never saw slavery who think there's still something owed for that (though I don't see them detonating themselves over it). Still, I can dream that all we have to do is hold our fire for a few generations, and it will be over.