Theodore Roosevelt once said that the U.S was to "walk quietly and carry a big stick". Today there is no walking quietly about it. The United States is still caring that big stick but we are lumbering over the other countries like Paul Bunion.
             President Bush has gotten his congressional mandate to launch a war on Iraq. America will, for the first time in its modern history, attack someone who has not attacked our allies or us first. We will exercise a first-strike option, something the United States did not do even at the height of the Cold War. We now abandon any pretense that this proposed war against Iraq is just. It cannot be justified.
             We will strike not because Iraq has attacked us, not because there is any direct proof Iraq harbors those who have attacked us, not because Iraq has attacked one of our allies, but because we think maybe, just maybe, Iraq might do something we really won't like in the next couple of years. Studs Terkel called World War II "the last good war." And perhaps it was. But that hasn't kept presidents from arguing that wars they wanted to wage since then are good and are justified. The first President George Bush went to great lengths in 1991 to argue before religious broadcasters that his proposed Gulf War fulfilled every tenet of the long-standing Just War theory.
             He bothered because war is horrific. War wreaks havoc on societies, destabilizes fragile balances of power, provokes others to join the violence and sears itself into the memory of those who survive. It takes a lot to justify going to war. Presidents before George W. Bush seemed to know that. Ethicists and theologians, military strategists and politicians have spent almost 2,000 years working out a theory of how you can justify war when it is so horrific. It is called, aptly enough, Just War theory. Taught at the War College in Washington, D.C., in Christian seminaries and political science departments, Jus
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