The key to U.N. reform is giving Americans a clearer picture of what the U.N. is and what it isn't, what it can be and what it can't be.

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

My second epiphany came as an intern at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The man I worked for was consumed with what was going on in Bosnia. And the more I knew [about it] the more saddened I was. There were these images of emaciated men behind barbed wire.... It was like, I've got to find a way to do something.

You've got to deploy serious political assets around a plan [in Darfur]. And the George W.] Bush administration has never had a plan. Ever. The Europeans don't want to do anything, saying, "The Americans are in charge of that." And in fact the Americans are in charge of naming it and bringing these resolutions every few weeks to the Security Council.

The story of U.S. policy during the genocide in Rwanda is not a story of willful complicity with evil. U.S. officials did not sit around and conspire to allow genocide to happen.

Re-examining our reasoning is not something that has come naturally to American statesmen.

Success is not about who never fails. It is about who can spring - or even stagger - back up.