Rumors of war in Iraq are now calcifying into war. Will it be just? Prominent ecclesiasts have now weighed in, their perspectives predictably following what they have long preached. The U.S. Catholic bishops and leaders of mainline Protestant denominations have brandished their moral veto. Comparatively hawkish national poll numbers raise old suspicions about whether their congregations are listening.

Proponents of the Christian just war tradition will want to interrogate both sides. Emanating from the Christian Gospel, developed by St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Thomas and later luminaries, the tradition allows for lethal force, unlike pacifism, but limits it through a strict set of criteria, unlike the holy crusade. When applied in the spirit of their Gospel roots, just war standards will focus particularly on the plight of the weak, the helpless, and the innocent. On balance, the tradition comes down against President Bush's war. But it is not an obvious judgment. Partisans will discover ruefully that the boundaries of ire and ideology into which they seek to squeeze moral standards are ones that suffering somehow does not respect.

Critics who call the Bush administration an imperialist one have troublingly little to say about the evil of the enemy, a dictator whose gulags have swallowed an estimated 200,000 political opponents and who sent somewhere around a million of his own people to their deaths in a war against Iran. They are also loath to acknowledge the justice of the U.S. protection of Iraqi Kurds from almost certain destruction at Saddam Hussein's hands through the "no-fly zone" of the past decade.

Yet defenders of the U.S. as a crusader for justice — surely the text of a personal ad for the idealistic neo-conservatives of the Bush administration — are reticent about the 100,000 to one million (estimates vary wildly) Iraqi civilians who have died at the hands of U.S. sanctions. A form of siege warfare, seeking to pressure an enemy leader by depriving his civilians of nourishment and medical care, sanctions run wildly afoul of just war morality's injunction against harming innocents as a means to an end. Defenders of sanctions lay the blame for suffering upon Hussein, who has prevented alleviatory food shipments from leaving unloading docks. But while Hussein's perfidy is real and his responsibility for suffering significant, neither exonerates the sanctions.

Absent Hussein's hindrance, does the U.S. then hope that sanctions will be finely tuned enough to deprive Iraqis of Persian jewelry and silk veils but leave them fed, cared for and just angry enough somehow to force their brutal dictator from power? In fact, U.S. policymakers have not even tried to avoid direct harm to civilians. They have rejected "smart sanctions," like those proposed by the Kroc Institute's George Lopez and David Cortright, that would block weapon building materials but allow humanitarian relief to pass; they have embargoed shipments of food and medicine to Iraqis; there is no record of them considering enforcing the delivery of supplies.

Sanctions also fail the just war tradition's proportionality test. Ten years of hardship and hundreds of thousands of deaths have failed to move Hussein an inch from his plans to build weapons of mass destruction or diminish his willingness to allow his people to suffer. One of the major lapses of just war voices in recent years has been their absent or muted outrage towards sanctions.

Similar balance, similar attention to the many ways, hidden and unhidden, that the "least of these" will be affected by war, must suffuse judgments of our prospective clash. Again, critics of the administration are selective. Their conspiratorial "daddy theory" and "oil theory" of Bush's motives merit a summary red ink evaluation: "lack of evidence." Worse, such critics fail to recognize that Hussein's massive violation of Iraqi human rights establishes a prima facie case for a type of just cause that has re-emerged into the just war tradition since the end of the Cold War: humanitarian intervention.

Though not without their debacles and ambiguities, interventions in Iraqi Kurdistan, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo — disasters whose magnitude Hussein's Iraq roughly matches — have shown the reasonable effectiveness of military force in stopping, relieving or preventing massive suffering. To be sure, U.N. or NATO multilateral support enhanced the legitimacy of these interventions, support that is as of now lacking in the case of Iraq, but a just cause does not strictly depend on it. Imagine if a Western power had stepped forth to quell the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, but was prevented by the contingent politics of the day from garnering a U.N. sanction — would the intervention have been unjust? In international relations, vigilantism is sometimes permissible

Ultimately, however, the just war criteria defeat the case for war against Iraq. They most directly reject President Bush's argument for "pre-emptive" war against Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. In fact, Bush misspeaks. Pre-emptive war is a corollary of the classic just war criterion of self-defense that allows for a first strike against an imminent and sufficient threat of attack. But neither condition obtains here. Though Hussein in all probability possesses chemical and biological weapons and seeks to develop nuclear weapons, he has not threatened their use.

What President Bush argues for instead is "preventive war" — a war fought against an enemy's potential and capacity, a war that egregiously defies what the tradition has understood as "self-defense." Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has reminded us that preventive war "does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church." Indeed, incorporating the concept into the tradition would render it virtually indistinguishable from realpolitik, for which the balance of power alone sufficiently justifies war.

Other criteria diminish further the justice of the war, though these are more difficultly assessed as they depend on contingent judgments. One is reasonable chance of success. Alleviating suffering means not only replacing Hussein but also building a stable democracy in his place. The American record of state building is not auspicious. Attempts over the past century to construct democracy in economically underdeveloped countries have widely failed; success has come only in Germany and Japan, both economically advanced countries whom the U.S. defeated, occupied and governed in the wake of a total war. In Iraq, ethnic division, economic backwardness and the danger of a long-term military occupation augur ill for reconstructive efforts.

The other major relevant criterion is proportionality — will the good of the war outweigh the bad? Thousands of Iraqi civilians are likely to die from damage to Iraq's infrastructure; urban warfare is predicted to kill far more combatants than were killed in the Persian Gulf War. A CIA report and top foreign policy analysts cite a strong risk that upon being attacked, Hussein will use his weapons of mass destruction against Israel or even the United States. The war is likely to alienate large swaths of Muslim opinion and fuel exactly the sort of resentment that leads young Muslim men into terrorism. And from the looks of things now, the war may lead to a deep fissure in the NATO alliance, a blow to future cooperative efforts even if such unity is not strictly required for justice.

Added up, these liabilities point to the comparative wisdom of a containment policy that successfully defeated a far more formidable power, one that once lived under Stalin, a dictator at least as evil as Hussein. A clearly expressed Western deterrent would prevent Hussein from using his nefarious weapons — not a guaranteed outcome, but one with far fewer risks and costs than a war.

Were he to change his justification to a humanitarian one and fight a war that succeeds quickly, elicits no horrific backlash and leaves Jeffersonian democracy in its place, President Bush's war could turn out to be just. It is the unlikelihood of such happy circumstances that hobbles his case. The case against war, though, is not an obvious one. It lies in doubts, not dogma. It is wrong not tout court, but on balance, all things considered, given the circumstances.

Daniel Philpott is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Faculty Fellow at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame.

The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.

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