Nice to see my colleague Brad taking up the discussion. Always a paradigm of clarity. Two thoughts on your entries. 1) If we are committed to democracy as a genuine political good for the governance of a community with a genuine common good, (at the very least in the minimal Churchillian sense of the least worst form of governance), we have to be willing to welcome the results of elections that are not obviously in our narrow national interests. We promote democracy because it is primarily good for them, even if there being other democracies is generally good for us in a secondary way, and despite the fact that they may on occasion be opposed to us. I had to remind a friend of this once when he complained that Turkey had elected some version of Islamists to govern itself. I said, "it's called democracy, and either we are genuinely for it, or it is merely a tool of our power, as most tyrants believe is the case in their democracies." Obviously the danger is that democracy can become the tool of tyranny, and destroy itself. But that is the risk one takes with the great goods of life.

2)On the justice of the war in Iraq, among my points was that if one is asking the question of jus ad bellum of our escalation of military hostilities to the level of an invasion, one is asking the wrong question. We were already at war with Iraq. The question of jus ad bellum had to be asked about the appropriate response to the invasion of an ally, namely Kuwait. And there I do not doubt there are different judgments among people of good will. But the correct question in the escalation of military hostilities to the level of the invasion, as I saw it, has to do with jus in bello. The good effects you are pointing to may well be overdetermining factors. But I don't believe they were necessary to answering either the incorrect question of jus ad bellum, or the correct question of jus in bello. But I certainly welcome any such goods.

In the abstract, I am likely to answer your last question in the negative, that is, that instilling democratic reform by force of arms is not itself a sufficient condition for jus ad bellum. On the other hand, I do think stopping genocide and ethnic cleansing probably are. And if I recall, at least some were citing humanitarian reasons in the case of Iraq, though not very often or very loudly. Though he disagreed with the case of Iraq, I seem to recall Michael Walzer on Charlie Rose saying something like, "when one can stop these things, one should." The only other thing I might add here is that when we think of some state of affairs as a sufficient condition for jus ad bellum, that does not imply that it is an obligation to go to war. All it implies is that one can go to war justly. It does not imply that one must. Even when one can, one must exercise a judgement of prudence about whether one should.

John