“There are no more important votes that a senator makes than on issues of war and peace,” writes the late Edward M. Kennedy in his memoir True Compass. In the fall of 2002, Kennedy had to make just such a vote–on a resolution granting President Bush the authority to invade Iraq. Congress approved the resolution, but Kennedy was one of only 23 senators to vote against. In True Compass, Kennedy offers insight into his decision making process, writing, “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.”

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

Below are the reasons Kennedy gives for concluding that Iraq failed to meet the definition of a just war:

• “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.”
• “As for “motives,” those stated by the Bush administration itself were unacceptable on their face…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.”
• “The war failed the “last resort” principle for reasons too obvious to dwell on here.”
• “On the question of proportionality—did the harm inflicted outweigh the good achieved?—I pointed, again, to the loss of American and Iraqi lives, the collapse of Iraqi society, the self-fulfilling prophecy of terrorists flooding into the ravaged country and using it as a base, the heightened tensions with the entire Islamic world, and our loss of international prestige generally.”
• “As for “a reasonable chance of success,” there never was a question that we would win the military phase of the Iraq war. The more significant success—ending terrorism, promoting regional stability, sustaining America’s reputation as a just nation and a model for enlightenment—has yet to be achieved.”