There is an interesting discussion going on over at the Mirror of Justice blog about whether the lack of any proof of WMD in Iraq means that the war was in fact unjust according to traditional just war theory. From a practical perspective the question is of limited relevance since whatever one thinks about it the question of what ought to be done now is separate and would need to be answered by reference to a different set of principles. But it is of theoretical interest and perhaps of practical importance in a different way related to President Bush's Inaugural Address and the policy he there enunciated.

I want to make two points related to the Iraq issue:

(1) With respect to the justification of the war the main reason was clearly the weapons of mass destruction threat. This was the main reason given by Bush immediately preceding the initiation of hostilities. This also seems clear from much of the reporting that has since been done, for example, Bob Woodward's book, Plan of Attack. Michael Scaperlanda asks if the war could justly be considered a continuation of the 1991 Gulf War. Rob Vischer is doubtful about this asking if such a principle would have justified bombing Germany over its failure to pay WWI reparations. The correct analogy here would not, I think, be the reparations, but rather the aggressive military acts that Germany took in the mid and late 1930s: the Sudetenland, the "rape of Prague," large-scale rearmament. These things could have justified a proportionate military response. Iraq was clearly in violation of the cease fire agreement that ended the fighting in 1991 (there was no peace treaty) and by the later Clinton years there was a great escalation in exchanges of fire between coalition aircraft and Iraqi anti-aircraft units. Iraq regularly targeted and fired on allied planes in the no-fly zone and violated the no-fly zone itself. There is some disagreement among international lawyers over whether or not this justified an end to the cease fire, but some clearly thought it did and it's certainly not patently unreasonable to see this as one casus belli.

(2) But, leaving that issue aside, what about the lack of WMD, which was certainly the main cause of the war? If it really is true that there were none that posed an immediate threat, as distinct from programs that could cause a longer term threat, might one want to make some such distinction as this: the was may have been objectively unjust in the sense that the conditions required to justify it didn't in fact exist, but subjectively just since the major decision-makers thought that those conditions did exist? The main U.S. commander, Tommy Franks has written in his memoir, American Soldier, that he absolutely expected to be attacked with WMD and had been told to expect it by the Jordanians and the Russians. While some have suggested that the president and his advisors lied about the threat, no persuasive evidence to that effect has ever been produced. If the war turns out to have been objectively unjust there is every reason to undertake massive reforms of our intelligence gathering capabilities and perhaps even reason to blame some officials for not doing their jobs effectively. But absent real evidence of mendacity I don't see a moral reason to think that they acted wrongly.