With the advent of recent reports from our former weapons inspector David Kay, the question of our motives for going to war with Iraq is once again in the news. I feel this is a good time to do a thorough analysis of those issues, something that I, regrettably, have not heard on this campus.The first argument against the war is that it was preemptive. This is silly. Pre-emptive war is merely a form of self-defense. Had it been as false intelligence indicated, that Saddam Hussein had the capabilities to launch a chemical or biological attack on the East Coast of the United States with only 45 minutes notice, it would have been our right and duty to attack him first. However, Saddam was never that imminent a danger to us. He was a threat to his people and his region, and was no doubt trying to become a threat to the United States. Nevertheless, his threat was not an immediate one. The problem is not with pre-emptive war, but with the fact that this could never be a pre-emptive war.

The second argument I have heard against the war is that because we have not yet found the weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), it is evident that Hussein never really had them. This argument, too, is ridiculous. Saddam used WMDs on his own people in 1989. We know he had them as late as 1998, when he kicked out our inspectors, who were in the process of finding and destroying them. Yet we cannot prove he had them when we went to war in 2003.

As Donald Rumsfeld would keenly point out, "absence of proof is not proof of absence." However, absence of proof still provides a valid argument against the war. If we have not found his weapons, then where are they? If they are no longer in Iraq, the most likely places for them to be would be with the Shiite extremists in Iran or with Hezbollah in Syria. These groups may well be a far bigger threat to the United States than Saddam ever was. If this is the case, disarming Saddam was not a successful military venture.

Yet another argument against the war is Bush's unilateralism. When something is the right thing to do, you have to do it, even when no one else is with you. However, having the right to go it alone does not mean that it is a virtue. When we went to war in Afghanistan after September 11, NATO offered its support, and Bush refused. When we finally did go to the U.N. about Iraq, and our threat of war got the inspectors back in, we were not truly open to the input of other nations. We did not give them any real incentives to join us, nor did we give the inspectors sufficient time to come back with a report that would have convinced other nations. When we snub our allies so many times, it is no wonder that they would not come to our aid when we needed them most.

There is one major argument in favor of the war: Saddam had committed genocidal acts against the Kurds and generally terrorized his country and region. For the sake of liberating the Iraqi people from the oppression of this tyrant, I supported the war. However, Bush never really believed in this reason, even if he gave it lip service. That is because it is a very liberal justification. The attitude of conservatives has generally been that the United States should just worry about its own problems, evidenced by Bush's promise not to use the U.S. military for nation-building during his 2000 presidential campaign. Clearly, Bush's main concern was not with the poor, oppressed Kurds.

Humanitarian intervention provides moral justification for going to war, however, it does not provide a moral imperative. Not everything that is morally justified is good public policy. Take Vietnam. Not only did thousands of American troops die in that war, but we did not accomplish the goal of getting the communists out of North Vietnam, or even stopping communism from spreading to Cambodia and Laos. In retrospect, going in was one of the worst foreign policy decisions of the 20th century, even if it was morally justified. We should not think every war will turn out like Vietnam, but neither should we forget the lessons of our mistakes there.

There are many things besides moral justification that must be considered before going into a voluntary war. In addition to all I have mentioned, there is also the fact that we were already at war. Al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11, and we were battling them in Afghanistan. What will be the result of opening up another front before finishing off Osama bin Laden?

In the final analysis, I think Saddam's genocidal history, his repeated violations of UN resolutions, and an unfinished war with him that began in 1991, made him the right person to go to war with at this time. However, the decision to enter into war must not be a hasty one. All the points I have mentioned here must be considered, and there must be a serious debate on the merits of each decision.

Bush and the Republican party, however, did not deal with these issues. They supported the decision to go to war first, and treated everything else as an afterthought. This is why they had no real plan for how to deal with all the complications that would arise in the aftermath of defeating Saddam Hussein.

In conclusion, I believe that we need to stand with Bush in defending America's moral justification of going to war with Iraq. However, we must not hesitate to criticize the Bush administration on matters where we believe they have erred or could have done better. Criticizing the president at wartime is not, as some Republicans would have you believe, unpatriotic. On the contrary, speaking your beliefs against the government is the most patriotic thing you can do.