Was it Unjust?

The revelations of weapons inspector David Kay that Iraq didn't have large stockpiles of WMD is troublesome at best. At worst, it is a grand indictment on the competency of U.S. intelligence gathering. While President Bush himself cannot skirt all responsibility for this information blunder, I don't believe it can be used as a charge that he committed the U.S. to an unjust war. Consider, for instance, that it is an indisputable fact that everyone, including the U.N., France, Germany and Russia, believed that Iraq was in material noncompliance with its obligation to reveal and hand over all of its WMD. In light of this, it is not beyond the pale of reason to have believed that Iraq's breach indicated that it was harboring large stockpiles of WMD. Indeed, none of the countries that refused to miltarily engage in Iraq with us has ever disputed this. Along with this reasonable inference, as well as the verified connections that Saddam had with terrorist groups, the decision to ultimately go to war was partly clinched by the WMD intelligence information that has since been shown to be erroneous. (But even then, note that Bush was still hesitant to go to war as evidenced by his promise not to attack Iraq if Saddam and his sons immediately exiled themselves. Hardly proof, as some Bush-haters have alleged, that Bush is a war-monger).

Wrong intelligence information or not, all indications strongly suggest that the Bush administration made a good faith and reasonable decision to wage a just preemptive war. And although in hindsight our credibility in the international community might be a little shot by executing this decision, there is no getting around the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens who probably wouldn't be alive today if we hadn't done what we did. This may be of little consolation to those who feign concern for the lives of our military in their opposition to the war (the very same people who tend to have no regard for the lives of the unborn and disingenuously equate Bush with Hitler) but I think it's something that all Americans can be proud of and claim that, in the end, was a war that was well worth fighting.