A just war must also confront a danger that is beyond question. Even when Dick Cheney said we knew exactly where the WMDs were, even when Tony Blair said Iraq could deploy them within 45 minutes, even when Colin Powell said the evidence was good enough for him, the danger was never beyond question. It is true that, as Bush said in his address on Monday evening, Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror. This was not the case, however, when we went in.

A just war must be a last resort. Which was not the case in Iraq, either. Remember the United Nations weapons inspectors who wanted just a few more weeks to do their work? Yet incredibly, on “Meet the Press” last Sunday, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, California Republican Duncan Hunter, suggested to Tim Russert that it was the U.N. inspectors who pushed us into Iraq. “We went to war … not on the statements of Mr. [Ahmad] Chalabi but on Hans Blix,” head of the U.N. inspectors, “who talked about the 8,500 liters of anthrax that Saddam Hussein put together … all of which would fit, Tim, in one pickup truck with good sideboards.” Here is what Blix actually said this of the possibility that there were chemical and biological weapons in Iraq when the war began: “One must not jump to the conclusion that they exist. However, this possibility is also not excluded.”

A just war also must be proportional, so that the harm inflicted does not outweigh the good achieved. Surely one of the saddest quotes I have read in recent weeks came from an American military reservist who works in a prison in civilian life and was allegedly involved in the abuses at Abu Ghraib: “The Christian in me says it’s wrong,” he purportedly told the soldier who reported the abuses. “But the corrections officer in me says, “I love to see a grown man piss himself’.” I’d really like to think that none of us is enjoying any part of this–including, among those who opposed the war, any sense that recent events are some kind of vindication, if there is any such thing, which I also tend to doubt. But aren’t we all a little bit like that man, who shocks us not only with his cruelty but with his honesty? In a democracy, we are all to some extent morally complicit in the acts of our government and those who represent it.

A just war must be declared by a legitimate authority–which some Gore partisans will always question. And finally, it must be driven by the right motives. I am not among those critics who believe that our president sent soldiers into Iraq to grab their oil, or to finish what his father started, or even to help him win re-election this November. On the contrary, I look at Bush and see a man who firmly believes he did the right thing. But as both admirers and critics have often noted, it would be out of character for him to feel otherwise.

The one and only time I interviewed Mr. Bush, when he was running in 2000, he called me by the wrong name several times, which was no big deal, and I didn’t correct him. But after this went on for a while, his adviser Karen Hughes, who was sitting in on the interview, finally said: “Governor, her name’s not Alison, it’s Melinda.”

“I think I know what her name is; we just had lunch last week,” Bush responded. “Your name IS still Melinda, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t changed it since last week?”

“No.”

“OK, then. Glad we got that cleared up.”

Hughes persisted, though. “Governor, you were calling her Alison.”

“I wasn’t calling HER Alison,” he said, with apparent conviction. “I was calling YOU Alison.”

At the time, I thought this was very funny. But now I’m not so sure. I keep wondering what has become of the “humble” foreign policy Bush talked about during the 2000 campaign. Yes, 9/11 has changed our president’s view of the world and given him a new sense of mission–of “crusade” as he once said. Yet it has not altered just-war theory or the rule of law—which in the absence of personal humility, or any doubts about right action, seem particularly useful guideposts.