It would be a huge mistake to abandon democracy promotion. Peaceful political change has been enormously successful in the past years in Eastern European countries as well as in countries like South Korea, South Africa, Chile and Indonesia. However, if possible, the use of force is something to avoid except in cases where genocide is threatened, like Bosnia or Libya or with regimes that threaten our security, like the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.

Firing employees, that's unfortunately part of doing business.

One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war.

For one thing I tend not to see myself in various moulds that people fit me into.

Putin is behaving in a very dangerous way. And Donald Trump sounds as though he would simply sit back and allow that to go on. I worry about where that would end up.

There has been a good deal of comment — some of it quite outlandish — about what our postwar requirements might be in Iraq. Some of the higher end predictions we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post- Iraq, are wildly off the mark. It is hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army — hard to imagine.

People seem to forget that Saddam was the only leader in the world who praised the attacks of 9/11 as a good thing.