It has often been our best instincts, not our worst, that have led us to do harm in the world.

When war transcends all boundaries, do the legal and moral categories we have relied upon to channel and constrain violence and coercion lose all value? Do we lose the checks and balances essential to preserving individual liberty and the rule of law? Or.

If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The old adage applies here as well. If your only functioning government institution is the military, everything looks like a war – and when everything looks like war, everything looks like a military mission.

What line separates the lawful wartime targeting of an enemy combatant from the extrajudicial murder of a man suspected, but not convicted, of wrongdoing? (p8)

My point here is not that the Iraq War was a bad idea in the first place (though it certainly was). My point is that this cynical, foolish, arguably illegal war might still have come right in the end—if only we had tried a little less hard to fix everything that struck us as broken.

It has often been our best instincts, not our worst, that have led us to do harm in the world

It takes a whole government to really screw up a war. A dollop of American hubris goes a long way too.

...And unpredictability can spread: one powerful outlier can pave the way for others, and as more states joint the outlier, the foundations of the rule of law begin to crumble.US counterterrorism practices--and the legal theories that under-pin them--are undermining the international rule of law in precisely this way...

Bluntly: the United States will need to accept some further loss of sovereignty in exchange for more just and effective mechanisms for solving collective global problems. No state can combat disease, climate change, or international terrorist organizations on its own--but any state can play a destructive and destabilizing role on its own.

As budget cuts cripple civilian agencies and programs, they lose their ability to perform ad they once did, so we look to the military to pick up the slack. . . . This requires still higher military budgets, which continues the devastating cycle.