What is most needed in Darfur is an international peacekeeping and protection presence, and this is what the Sudanese government most wants to avoid.

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.

Historical hypocrites have themselves carried out the very human rights abuses that they suddenly decide warrant intervention elsewhere.

'Acting as if...' I decided, ridiculously in retrospect, that my experience covering women's volleyball for my college newspaper was sufficient for me to at least try to become a war correspondent.

It is easy to get used to the morning news, habituated. But don't. The morning news is yours to alter.

You could be in the United Nations office all night every night and still feel like you were not making a sufficient dent in the world's problems. I think the key is prioritization. But every job presents the tyranny of the inbox, of allowing the urgent to crowd out the important. So we have to have our lodestars.

Countries that intervene militarily rarely do so out of pure altruism.