As even a democracy like the United States has shown, waging war can benefit a leader in several ways: it can rally citizens around the flag, it can distract them from bleak economic times, and it can enrich a country's elites.

Another longstanding foreign policy flaw is the degree to which special interests dictate the way in which the "national interest" as a whole is defined and pursued.... America's important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics, which, as the war in Lebanon last summer demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive.

My basic feeling about military intervention is that it should be a last resort, undertaken only to stave off large-scale bloodshed.

I joke that I spent 38 years scouring the globe, going to war zones, trying to find the person with my exact birthday.

I was interning in the CBS sports affiliate in Atlanta with Robin Roberts.... I was taking notes on a Braves-Padres game, and on the live feed came footage of these kids protesting and getting crushed during the Tiananmen Square uprising in China in 1989. In that moment I became like a lot of young people in this country today, horrified and inspired but confused as to what I might do.

When I wake up in the morning, I think about Syria.

American decision-makers must understand how damaging a foreign policy that privileges order and profit over justice really is in the long term.