This is brilliantly argued but I'd add a few some more conditions.

The public and its representatives must form a consensus in favor of the war for it to be just.

The public and its representatives must be informed of the risks and requirements of the operations in order to give considered consent.

I'm arguing here that a dictatorship can never participate in a just war, since its people would never be polled or brought on board in any way.  I'm also arguing that though I believe Obama acted within his own moral framework and though I credit him with putting a praiseworthy amount of thought into this decision, that he was entirely deficient about bringing the public into the discussion.

The decision making here was too unilateral for me to support.

Very sharp as usual, Doc. I do think, however, that you miss two other important motivations for war: self-defense and retaliation.

In discussing imminence, you compared the U.S. to a police officer. That's an appropriate analogy for American intervention in Libya, but I don't think it fits our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq nearly so well. When enemies attack a non-strategic foreign country, you're unlikely to see much enthusiasm for war except under extreme circumstances, such as genocide. But when they attack the U.S., it doesn't take many casualties to provoke a wildly disproportionate response with very few moral qualms from much of the population.

The better analogy would be an intruder coming onto our property an assaulting members of our family. While the legality of self-defense actions may be narrowly defined, I think you would find most people to be fairly permissive about the virtue of a disproportionate response, especially in the absence of credible authorities. Such a response might even include retaliation against the attacker's cohorts. In the True Grit, for example, I doubt many audience members were terribly concerned about the ethics of killing off Ned Pepper's gang along with Tom Chaney.

Of course, the war in Iraq was neither self-defense nor punitive retaliation, but the point is that Bush offered both rationales. It was these dishonest appeals rather than a pious appeal to righteousness that made the war so popular at the time.

This is an excellent summary of the basis of the just war. 

I would only add that part that truly get tricky is:

Perhaps most importantly, a just war is a last resort. It's not okay to kill a lot of people because you're preventing even more death and violence. It's only acceptable to kill a lot of people because it is the only possible way to prevent even more death and violence. If you have another option for averting the violence, you should take it. You must take it.

I am thinking of Afghanistan here, and not in terms of what will happen to Afghanistan.  It has been posited that one the reasons, if the not the primary reason, we are staying there is because of the situation in Pakistan.  And that if things aren't dealt with as they are now, that things could (would) unravel so quickly that we would find ourselves in a situation where the success factor of a just war would be thrown out of the window.  From this perspective, looking at the potential consequences for the region and the global community, it is practical and just to keep the forces in Afghanistan because it is the closest thing we can get to impeding the disasterous unraveling.

Now this brings in the condition of imminence. Except in a few rare incidents, imminence is still a judgment call.  Most of the time when a sniper takes out a hostage taker, the hostage taker's finger is not one millionth of an inch from the trigger and moving closer.  The decision that hostage taker will likely kill the hostage(s), so when the sniper gets a clean shot, he or she takes it, even if it when the hostage taker has a brief moment to pause and pick his or her nose.

While the development of WMD can be closely gauged as to their imminence, the recent "Arab Spring" shows that things in the streets can happenly very quickly without much warning.  They are like earthquakes, in that all the conditions are there, but the "pop" could be tomorrow or 25 years from now.

Going back to the original post , it defines away the crucial need to incorporate consideration of matters of degree.. For example

The question, which has yet to be answered, is whether our military power can protect those civilians from violence.

 should read

 protect a large enough number of those civilians from enough violence for long enough

....

This is a mellifluous argument, Doctor Cleveland, well written, well reasoned, and still full of too many holes for me to leave alone (against my better instincts, as I know in advance that I won’t talk you down one iota from your lofty ‘just war’ perch.

I really dislike what we are told is going on in Libya lately, and kinda loved it when the rebels were routing the Gadaffi forces.  And part of me wanted to cheer the idea of a ‘no-fly zone, even though the Military (in the form of Gates and others) told the press (tacky, IMO) that it would be difficult and not terribly productive.

(This is going to be, of necessity, a bit out of order as my thoughts coalesce; sorry for that.  My mind is awash with contradictions to what you have presented here.)  You’vbe presented an argument that might stand in some imagined world of your creation and belief, and I may too, on the other end of the spectrum.

The topic of the UNSC 1973 was brought up by kgb, and I will say that when first commenting on the boards I’d thought that the War Powers Act covered the Pres.  Turns out I was wrong, as there had to be clear and imminent danger to allow him the sixty days (plus 48 hours to notify Congress, not ask for a Resolution, to be in the clear Constitutionally.  The potential instability of the Arab World as imminent danger is in the eye of the beholder, but almost silly, even if you were to factor in the recent Jasmine/Arab Spring Revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.

In my further hunt for the Constitutionality of the Lybian War, I found a man who believes adamantly that this 1945 law concerning the Prez and the UN had merit, i.e. , The United Nations Participations Act, though when I posted it to (alleged) scholars, they said it wasn’t quite it, and had been since amended (see links).

http://jenkinsear.com/2011/03/19/a-legal-war-the-united-nations-participation-act-and-libya/

Another point you seem to miss is that there isn’t any end game spelled out.  We now know that the no-fly zone has killed Gadaffi’s chances of any air war.  Great.  But he is still blasting people and buildings apart with tanks, which he/they have been for several weeks, though the bombs were scary and sounded horrid, I think did far less damage than the tanks did.  Where now then?  Gadaffi hasn’t left, the President erred weeks ago, IMO, saying he needed to be gone, then doing nothing to back it up, effectively emboldening him (he is a psychotic narcissist, after all).  No one seems quite in agreement about what’s next: kill more tanks, kill more infantry, train more rebels (Tripartate soldiers or Blackwater dudes?). 

Kgb had been upset that at FDL (dunno, really), that anti-war commenters were upset that we don’t know who ‘the rebels’ are; maybe they are thugs, tribal thugs, and former Gadaffi military thugs we are helping.  I kinda agreed that was odd.  The I heard a Hillary  Clinton re-run of Senate Intel or something a month ago saying she thought they might be allied with Al Qaeda.  Well, there went that argument.  We don’t know; does it matter?

Well, yeah; it will once the dust settles, and either We or They try to put a government together, or rebuild a shattered economy.  Will we be there helping?  Is that why Hillary and Sarkosy like Mustafa Jalil who’s been friends with Sarkozy, appealed to Hillary?  We the West set up another puppet government like in Iraq?  (oops; that didn’t work out so well…)

I suppose I’ll leave it you assess whether or not Obama should have been schmoozed into all this by Susan Rice and Samantha Powers and their guilt over not going into Rawanda  to end that genocide, and Clinton being convinced by their solidarity, now aiming to quit Obama she’s so pissed at his…lassitude over this.  I’ll give him credit for making it a wider mission, but really: who will lead the NATO forces if they put ‘boots on the ground’ as many are already contemplating?

Last thing I’ll ask you to consider is this: if it’s a mission of mercy for an emerging Democratic movement, why is Obama and the reat of the West giving the finger to those in Bahrain and Yemen whose movement participants have been killed so much more viciously, and in greater numbers, than in Libya?  We know what Gadaffi said he’d do; in those other nations, their leaders were doing it.

Some op-eds to consider:

Stephen Walt (FP magazine):          http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=128959

Richard Falk :  

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/03/2011322135442593945.html#

 and Michael C. Hudson on what it’s like in Bahrain:

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/03/201132111471720661.... 

 In the end, I think you maybe haven’t explored the darker sides of military misadventures in the ME, and aren’t nearly cynical enough.  This reads like you still live in Yesteryear, when we truly thought we could save the world with the proper application of our Military Might.  (Stephen Walt addresses that, by the by.)

 And an Oldie But Goodie from Walt: 'Why do they hate us, and how many Muslims have we killed in the last thirty years?' 

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/11/30/why_they_hate_us_ii_how_many_muslims_has_the_us_killed_in_the_past_30_years 

It's this sort of thing which made me argue earlier that the U.S. should sit itself out of these sorts of decisions and actions for a while.

What I man is that the 4 conditions listed above are a select subset of the wider Just War debate. What's interesting is that selecting this subset manages to entirely remove serious questions and considerations about the decision-maker and potential warring nation - the US - from the moral calculus. Rather, the U.S. gets to act as an external or (perhaps better) "above it all" arbiter, judge and decider.

I'm sure this goes down well in US foreign policy discussion circles, but as a full discussion on the morality of this war, I'd argue these omissions pretty much ensure the debate never much gets much deeper than a Sunday afternoon wader and his underwater farts. 

For example, in my view, the past actions and present intentions of those making the decision to go to war have to be included in any moral calculus. It is not just about the "Evil" of the guy you are fighting, or the way it's fought ("Proportionate"), or the alternatives ("Last Resort"), or the probability of Success - it's about YOURSELF, as well. This set of issues is raised in many Just War discussions, I'm not just being randomly bad-temered here.

To put sample names to faces here (with the aim of bringing out the importance of the person/nation intervening), simply imagine if Stalin invaded a country to save it from a local tyrant... versus, say, the UN under Dag Hammarskjold and Lester B. Pearson. Or better, if Sweden and Canada under those two leaders invaded, versus Stalin. Stalin's track record and intentions would lead one to decide very different things even if the nature of the country being attacked and the odds of success were the same.

So, a genuine weighing of one's own intentions - and one's previous actions, which one is often known by - must come into play. And this is no trivial thing, looking for "cleanliness" or perfection in intentions, it's about how many will die, and when and how.

The Wiki discussion captures some of this as "Right Intention,"  and mentions as a nice example, that "revenge" not be a primary determinant. I think we all remember Iraq, and sense that there was a bit of revenge in play there. 

Iraq, in fact, being an interesting case. It's actually quite possible to see it passing the 4 bare conditions set out in your blog, if that's all there are to a Just War. Good chances of success (yup)... when launched, ensure the violence is proportionate (doable)... we'd already been doing the no fly zone thing for years, so last resort... and Saddam was an evil butcher, same as Gaddafi (probably worse)... 

The only thing one might argue is that the risk of Saddam performing an immediate "slaughter of the innocents" wasn't quite as obvious, perhaps. Unless, of course, Saddam actually had those nasty big-time weapons. And if that was the case, their mere possession - combined with the ability to launch them within seconds - means we'd better act, right? And I'm not just referring to WMD's and their ability to be used against us, I'm referring to gas and air forces and things like that, which can be used - and regularly are - against their own citizens. 

Oh dear. 

Because then, if we're only ever using just these 4 conditions, we're into a world where any of dozens of the world's frequent butchers should - if we can - be taken out. Because pretty much any tyrant worth his/her salt is responsible for the indirect and direct death of thousands of their own people these days. Are we sure we feel that much "Justice" in our sails?

One obvious additional problem that's arising here is that should a nation take it upon itself to launch a series of Just Wars, even against real-world tyrants, then... we may have just created a bit of a monster. 

Back to Libya. The thing is, by using only these 4 conditions, and thus clearing ourselves from having to own our moral responsibility for anything, we avoid some nasty conclusions. For instance, is there any evidence at all that the United States of America, in its modern war-fighting mode, will avoid the large-scale death of innocent civilians? You can say "yes, it tries very hard." In reply, I might say that a method of fighting a war - surgically and all that - which has left hundreds of thousands dead can only be considered to be "avoiding" killing civilians if one's brain has turned to drool. And then there's the ugly, but more one-on-one examples, such as torture and the sorts of killings as are in Der Spiegel.

Looking back, for many decades the US armed, trained, funded and protected some of the worst torturers and murderers in the world. See: Central American history. But it was only because we could position it against the much-worse Soviet Union that it became tolerable. (For us.) 

But today? War on Terror? Really? Nobody sensible believes that stuff.

How about our motives, then? We turned Gaddafi into one of the world's great bogeymen. Sure, he's a psycho. So were dozens of others, with 60% of them being put in place or propped up there by us. 

Then, more recently, though it's being wiped from the memory banks, just as we did with Saddam, we made him... our buddy. Huge big contracts. Condi Rice, Blair, Sarkozy coming in for cozy visits. 

So. I would argue that the evidence is  that we go to war far too often, and for vile, and often hidden, motivations. Revenge. Pride. Domestic political gain. Oil. Reconstruction contracts. Anger. Fear of the Other. etc. And, I believe the evidence is also that we kill enormous numbers of innocents when we fight. And when we leave, it is not even clear that we are leaving the nations we fought to "save" in better condition than when we entered. I believe the daily life of Iraqis, for instance, is clearly worse than it was pre-No Fly Zone. 

Now. This is actually a polite way to put all this. The harsher way is to say that there's a nation out there which is inflicting hundreds of thousands of deaths on citizens of a series of nations...  a country which then installs drug-lords and torturers and the criminally corrupt on the local thrones...  which enriches its private interests in the process... which has shown an inability to use its legal system to prosecute its failures in these wars, and has blocked international efforts... which seems to have created a political dynamic whereby even "peace-loving" Presidents escalate and initiate war.

In Just War terms, mirrors are a requirement.

Which brings us to the question of the other nations the US is going to war with. The Europeans and the Canadians (and similar Canuckistani slime.) For starters, we hear a lot of tripe being tossed around about the UN, and its noble processes, and how the US has to follow along. This is from those whose memories apparently fail to go back much further than 2 weeks or so. The "morality" of an act cannot be determined by a process in which one's own vote, actions and influence actually DETERMINES the outcome. And if the US wished, the whole UN vote would have gone the other way.

Second, we often hear that the US is going to war with "France," and "Italy" and "Britain" and "Canada" at its side, or at their behest. Apologies, but this is not so - and that's of real moral consequence. If Silvio Berlusconi and David Cameron and Stephen Harper and their ilk - men whom I regard as moral monsters, men who have shown already that they will support the immoral and the unsupportable, men who presently lack strong public support and who would claw to regain position - the simple fact that these men maneuver to bring forward votes behind war, does not in any way lend moral weight to the actions of the US. Shorter: those in alliance with that nice Mister Hilter are in no ay cleared of making up their own minds.

In sum, we may agree on a goal, Doc. But the idea that these 4 conditions alone enable us to say the US is entering a "Just War" is not so. In the same way, I can see no clear support for a "Just War" argument in nations such as Canada, the UK, France and Italy. Blood dripping from our hands from the recent and ongoing wars, appalling and immoral leadership, duplicity and secret double-dealings with the "enemy" in question - sorry, we're not cutting it. 

And sometimes - though I rarely argue this - the lack of a clearcut case is, in fact the answer. Seen more widely than on these 4 narrow clauses, a clear case for Just War does not exist.

I just lost a long comment by hitting paste on my word program instead of copy. I want to kill something.
 The jist of my lost comment was: Who [that matters] gives a big rat's ass whether any war ever fought meets the qualifications of being a "just war"?  By "who" I do not mean who among us engaging in this intellectual circle jerk interesting conversation but rather who among any group who is influential in deciding one way or another whether to go to war. Did any leader ever decide against war because it might get a bit disproportional or did every one of them hope they would have a little shock and awe to whip out when the time came?
 Oh yeah, the idea that we are not trying to kill anyone, we are only trying to protect a certain group of people by shooting down airplanes, and blowing up tanks, and bombing columns of vehicles, that idea needs some examination.
I could be for intervention and despise the leader who made the decision if I believed he made it for wrong reasons.