LOS ANGELES -- If there is one country in Asia that can serve as a metaphor for all the good and the evil in the world, it may well be little Sri Lanka, formerly known as Ceylon.
This physically gorgeous island nation off the coast of India is a mess. A few years ago, after some two decades of vile civil war, its people experienced an unaccustomed respite: a rather well-observed, virtually unprecedented, long-overdue ceasefire.
How long would a ceasefire really last -- a few months, a year or two or perhaps four at most? But while it did last, it suggested that Sri Lanka had a splendid future, that it could mature into a gem like Switzerland or Singapore, that it could offer the rest of the world an exemplary measure of hope that our planet is moving toward a higher level of civilization rather than descending into a Hobbesian state of nature wherein life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."