The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility. There are times when we must take this poison-just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy to live. We cannot succumb to despair. Force is and I suspect always will be part of the human condition. There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral.

We in the industrialized world bear responsibility for the world's genocides because we had the power to intervene and did not. We stood by and watched the slaughter in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Rwanda where a million people died.

Chris Hedges, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning