True, we have assumed implicitly a responsibility to “fix what we have broken,” but the war has thereby not become any more just.

Over the centuries Christians have developed two basic attitudes toward war, and both would rule out as immoral a preventive war against Iraq.

The first attitude, shared by many Christians, is pacifism. It opposes military action in all circumstances and therefore clearly condemns a preventive war. From the perspective of this tradition, the Iraq war is a perversion of Jesus’ basic teachings and therefore not simply unchristian but positively anti-Christian. Whereas Jesus said, “if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also,” President Bush, who claims to be a follower of Jesus, says, “if you think that Hussein will strike you on one cheek, hit him, along with innocent bystanders, as hard as you can on both of his cheeks.”

Even according to a less stringent “just war” tradition--which does not deem all military action illegitimate but rather offers criteria when war may be justified or even necessary--a preventive war against Iraq was morally unacceptable.

The central criterion for the just war is a “just cause.” The Christian tradition has consistently understood just cause to mean, in the words of Thomas Aquinas, that “those who are attacked should be attacked because they deserve it on account of some fault.”

Preventive war does not satisfy this criterion since it is waged not to “avenge wrongs” actually committed, but to prevent wrongs that are only anticipated. Unless it was demonstrated that Hussein’s regime posed a clearly identifiable and imminent danger to the U.S. (or to Iraq’s neighbors), the war against Iraq was manifestly unjust. No persuasive evidence has been presented of such an immediate threat, and no links have been established between Hussein’s regime and networks of terrorist organizations.

A preventive war of the kind proposed against Iraq is morally unacceptable for a very simple reason: It cannot be just to condemn masses of people to certain death in order to avert potential death of an equal or lesser number of people. President Bush seems intent to act as if the entire population of Iraq consisted of one single person named Saddam Hussein. In his speech before the United Nations the suffering of the Iraqi people (who themselves opposed American intervention as much as they disliked their cruel leader) figured only as motivation for war. Their suffering was not seen as an inescapable consequence of the war.