If you know the context of that statement, it sends chills down your spine.

The Buddhist monks and other protesters in Myanmar had been getting their messages to the outside world.

In e-mails.

And in e-mailed photographs and videos.

And so, the brutal oppressors of Myanmar had their pictures.

They had the pictures of the people who marched peacefully in the streets of Yangon.

Where a sweet, talented young woman lived, at least some years ago, and, through the efforts of the United Nations Association of Rochester, stayed for a few wonderful days with our family.

We talked a lot about our families. And we showed Khin and our two other guests, one from China, one from Papua New Guinea, around Rochester. This was the autumn after Tiananmen; our guest from China, an employee of the Chinese news agency, hardly spoke for the entire weekend.

Khin understood, but she did not have that reticence. Did we not know, she asked, that Myanmar had gone through the same thing?

When Khin left, to head back to her family and her job in Yangon, she called us aside and gave us a blessing: a ritual that children perform before parents when they are parting, she said.

We have worried since. And over the past weeks, the worry heightened. We dare not contact her; have never tried to contact her, for fear that it would lead to great harm.

The television images of the most recent protests were moving enough. The early e-mail reports were frightening - monks taken off to goodness knows where, monks and other protestors beaten, tortured, thrown against walls, killed.

"Please tell your audience of the full extent of the fate of the monks," pled one e-mail forwarded to me from a Rochesterian. "‘Arrested' is not enough expression. They have been bludgeoned to death!"

We can not intervene in all of the world's atrocities. And so we watch helplessly as killings take place in, say, Myanmar. And Darfur.

Atrocities took place in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and the Bush administration felt they merited our intervention. Or used those atrocities as cover for our intervention. We and the Iraqis are paying for that now.

In Sunday's Times Magazine, Dexter Filkins talks with Kanan Makiya, one of the Iraqi exiles who pushed for a US invasion. Now a professor at Brandeis, Makiya is wrestling with his feelings - and with the question of whether he would have made the effort he made, had he known what the result would be.

To try to get rid of Saddam, he concludes, was the "moral thing to do." Was the problem, then, the execution? The failure of the Iraqi people to do their part?

Americans and Iraqis will be debating those questions for years. Many of us are convinced that the Bush administration invaded Iraq for reasons that had nothing to do with concern for the Iraqi people. Whether we are right or wrong, though, it's clear that we have all lost a great deal in this war.

One of the greatest losses is our moral standing. And that will make it harder for us to stand with other nations in dealing with countries like Myanmar and Darfur. Much less lead.

The Dems' rush: Joining my weekend required reading list recently: conservative Peggy Noonan's Saturday column in the Wall Street Journal. Late last month, Noonan was arguing in favor of Columbia University's Ahmadinejad speaking invitation. This past Saturday, she applauded the Democrats' strong presidential-contender bench, and whipped the clothes off the Hillary Inevitability.

That the Clinton nomination seems like a done deal is due more to money and political connections than, oh, electability and where she would take the country, and it's time somebody said so. Noonan did.

The Democrats have plenty of candidates who deserve careful attention. It's time they all got it.