Exclusive Kennedy Memoir Excerpt: 'No Just Cause' For Iraq War [View All]

All of America's people deserved better than the misuse of U.S. power in Iraq. As did the Iraqi people. The war's effects are still fresh as I write these words, and so I will attempt no detailed retelling of them here. Looking over my personal journals and the many speeches and briefing memos in my files, I am struck once again at how clear the march to disaster seemed to me at the time, and how brazenly the administration's justifications departed from reality.

That march began in the glow of Americans' support for President Bush immediately following the September 11 attacks by Al Qaeda, and for his sending troops to Afghanistan to hunt down the terrorists responsible. The president and his men lost no time exploiting that trust and goodwill. In what I have called an "extraordinary policy coup" led by Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the administration succeeded in changing the subject to Iraq.

I had met Vice President Cheney years before, when he was a congressman, through our mutual friend Alan Simpson, who like Cheney was from Wyoming. Cheney seemed agreeable to me at first, affable and smart, even though we had different political views. His votes were ultraconservative. Maybe we just didn't notice how extreme he was because his positions didn't carry the day. But when he became vice president, he had the power, but he lacked the good judgment to see beyond those extreme views.

I withheld my final judgment on the prudence of the Iraq war until I went back to the Senate in September 2002. There are no more important votes that a senator makes than on issues of war and peace, and I wanted to understand the issue fully before reaching a final decision. As a member of the Armed Services Committee, I listened carefully to the testimony of the witnesses.

I was struck by the consistent drumbeat of opposition to the rush to war by respected military leaders--General John Shalikashvili, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander, Europe; marine general Joseph Hoar, former commander in chief of Central Command. I will never forget what General Hoar in particular said in response to my question about urban warfare. He said that Baghdad would look like the last fifteen minutes of the Spielberg movie Saving Private Ryan.

My views on war drew upon the teachings of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. A distillation of their philosophies has yielded six principles that guide the determination of a "just" war, and these principles were my guiding arguments:

• A war must have a just cause, confronting a danger that is beyond question;
• It must be declared by a legitimate authority acting on behalf of the people;
• It must be driven by the right intention, not ulterior, self-interested motives;
• It must be a last resort;
• It must be proportional, so that the harm inflicted does not outweigh the good achieved; and
• It must have a reasonable chance of success.

There was no just cause for the invasion of Iraq, I declared time and again. Iraq posed no threat that justified immediate, preemptive war, and there was no convincing pattern of relationships between Saddam and Al Qaeda. The "legitimate authority," the Congress, indeed approved authorization for the use of force in Iraq in October 2002, but it acted in haste and under pressure from the White House, which intentionally politicized the vote by scheduling it before midterm elections. By contrast, in 1991, the administration of the first President Bush timed the vote on the use of military force against Iraq to occur after midterm elections, in order to de-politicize the decision.

As for "motives," those stated by the Bush administration itself were unacceptable on their face. "The Bush administration says we must take preemptive action against Iraq," I pointed out from the Senate floor in October 2002. "But what the administration is really calling for is preventive war, which flies in the face of international rules of acceptable behavior." I was far blunter less than two years later, when the loss of life among our young troops and the devastation to Iraqi society had grown grotesque. The war, I charged on the Senate floor in July 2004, was "a fraud, cooked up in Texas" to advance the president's political standing.