This article examines three arguments according to which the Iraq war has been justified: preemptive or preventive self-defense, law enforcement, and humanitarian rescue. It concludes that for empirical and moral reasons, the Iraq war lacks a just cause. In the course of making that judgment, the article explores moral and practical implications of a preventive war policy. It also examines efforts to invoke one justification—rescue—retrospectively to justify the war. The article claims that such ex post justifications confuse the meaning of intention and, wittingly or unwittingly, allow leaders to authorize a resort to force in bad faith. Retrospective justifications also fail to understand that different burdens are attached to ad bellum rationales. That claim is premised on the idea that self-defensive wars join duty and interest in ways that wars of rescue do not. To assume that arguments can shift from self-defense to rescue, without recognizing that these entail different kinds of sacrifice, is to discount the respect due to those whose sacrifice is required. If altruistic policies are expected to be carried out by soldiers, stronger reasons than self-defensive purposes are necessary to justify the risks, reasons that avoid the allegation of leading in bad faith.

The paper develops a critical analysis of deliberative approaches to global governance. After first defining global governance and with a minimalist conception of deliberation in mind, the paper outlines three paradigmatic approaches: liberal, cosmopolitan, and critical. The possibilities and problems of each approach are examined and a common concern with the scope for “deliberative reflection” in global governance is addressed. It is argued that each approach, to varying degrees, foregrounds the currently underdetermined state of knowledge about global governance, its key institutions, agents, and practices. In doing so, the question “ What is global governance?” is retained as an important and reflective element of ongoing deliberative practices. It is suggested that this constitutes the distinctive and vital insight of deliberative approaches to global governance.

The notorious Bybee Memorandum produced by the Bush Administration in 2002 defends the use of coercive interrogation by (among other things) arguing that torturing terrorists in order to prevent future harm could be justified as a form of “self-defense.” This argument relies on a recent and little-known theory of self-defense that I call the “distributive justice” theory. The goal of this essay is to demonstrate that distributive justice is a flawed theory of self-defense and must be rejected, thus undercutting the argument that torture can be justified as self-defense. Harm inflicted on a person who is in custody and no longer able to commit further acts of violence cannot plausibly be considered a form of self-defense.