David Bosco

In the spring of 1994, when the assassination of Rwanda's president unleashed a horrific three-month genocide that would ultimately kill 800,000 people, Rwanda's man at the United Nations assured the world's diplomats that his government was not to blame.

There's no judicial activism quite like Spain's judicial activism. Since the late 1990s, Spanish judges have launched criminal cases involving human rights abuses committed in more than a dozen countries, including Argentina, Chile and Rwanda. Dashing "superjudge" Baltasar Garzon has garnered worldwide headlines by leading many of these cases, most famously moving to indict ex-Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998 and sparking a months-long, multi-jurisdictional dispute that finally ended with Pinochet back in Chile, under investigation by national authorities.

Does It Have to Be Genocide for the World to Act?

Not only is NATO forfeiting the intelligence benefits that can come with real-time interrogation, it's sending detainees into an Afghan prison system poorly equipped to handle them and rife with abuse.

Nation-building in Bosnia -- one-fifth the size of Iraq -- is really just beginning. It's a convoluted process, and the absence of blood keeps the camera crews away. Yet the thankless diplomatic slog is making a unified state possible.