Three hundred thousand lives. That’s how many President Bill Clinton believes he could have saved had he intervened sooner to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Today, it is natural to ask if those same lessons apply in Syria. This weekend, President Bashar al-Assad again used chemical weapons on his own citizens, aid workers said. Nearly half a million people have died in the civil war, according to estimates.

Yet the track record of “just wars” is, at best, mixed. Afghanistan drags on. Libya is in chaos. And today, on the 15th anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, Iraq’s legacy looms between a fraught lesson on the morality of war and a criminal act.

The preamble of UNESCO’s constitution declares that “wars begin in the minds of men,” and Syria is the clear product of thinking that is backward, bestial, and brutal. So the real question is not really, Should the West use force? The question is, What can begin to change that mind-set?

Seventy years ago, the world was witnessing several civil wars that would lead to 2.5 million deaths. Progress has come with greater political and economic freedoms and with greater global collaboration. It has saved millions of lives and begun to change “the minds of men.” An ironclad commitment to those ideals, history has shown, is by far the strongest weapon in any arsenal against tyranny and violence.  

Here are our five stories for the day, which look at the nature of leadership in the Middle East, the extraordinary power of social media in the Philippines, and benefits of changing perceptions.