American airstrikes...create risks, especially if our intelligence there is rusty. The crucial step, and the one we should apply diplomatic pressure to try to achieve, is for Maliki to step back and share power with Sunnis while accepting decentralization of government. If Maliki does all that, it may still be possible to save Iraq. Without that, airstrikes would be a further waste in a land in which we've already squandered far, far too much.

We all might ask ourselves why we tune in to these more trivial matters and tune out when it comes to Darfur

Every year 3.1 million Indian children die before the age of 5, mostly from diseases of poverty like diarrhea.

There are other issues I have felt more emotionally connected to, like China, where I lived and worked for some time. I was living there when Tiananmen Square erupted

Most of the villagers were hiding in the bush, where they were dying from bad water, malaria and malnutrition

In much of the world, the most dangerous thing a woman can do is become pregnant.

The intelligence community is so vast that more people have top secret clearance than live in Washington. The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.