Is this war, unjust in its beginning, likely to result in a just ending? Can a bad war yield a good peace?

I doubt it. I cannot claim to have knowledge of the future, but I would suggest that whether such a peace is possible depends upon the answers to these 10 questions:

1) Since President Bush has fought this war to remove Saddam Hussein, will we end the war if he is killed or surrenders? If he or other Iraqi combatants surrender, will we treat them like POWs with Geneva Convention rights, or will we assign them the status of our recently-fabricated, nearly-rightless category, "unlawful combatant"?

2) If we win the war, will the United States install its choice of ruler for Iraq rather than the Iraqi choice?

3) Will our victory in the war result in armed conflict among the various secondary antagonists on the scene? Or will we protect from one another Baath Party loyalists, other Iraqis, Iranians, Kuwaitis, Kurds, Turks, Sunnis, and Shiites? Would not U.N. peacekeepers be better received as protectors and peacekeepers than the conquering American and British soldiers?

4) When we conquer Iraq - no, President Bush corrects me, when we liberate Iraq - will the Kurds use their American-granted freedom to secede from Iraq and seek unity with Turkish Kurds against Turkey's wishes? Will the Shiites use their American-granted freedom to secede from Iraq and seek unity with Iranian Shiites in accord with Iran's wishes?

5) Will the triumphant United States respect the Islamic faith common to most Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds? Will the strongly religious President Bush encourage American missionaries of his religious persuasion to descend on and proselytize Iraqis (apparently, a program much like this one is already afoot)? Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, who has publicly called Islam a "wicked" religion, has announced that he has workers ready to enter Iraq to minister to Iraqis' spiritual needs.

6) Will our victory in the war result in American oil businesses controlling Iraqi oil production and sales? Will we allow Iraqis chosen by Iraqis to control their own oil, even if these Iraqis continue or create oil production or marketing relationships with countries such as France, Russia and China who opposed the United States in the United Nations. The Pentagon reportedly wants to put former CIA director James Woolsey at the head of a new Ministry of Information in Iraq, and a senior American oil executive in charge of oil exploration and production. Can such arrangements possibly be just?

7) Will the United States allow the civil successes of Baath socialism from its nonbelligerent period to be reinstituted if the Iraqi people want them? Will we allow (immensely popular) socialistic universal health care and free education programs (through to the Ph.D. level) to return to Iraq, even though the U.S. government will not provide them for its own citizens?

8) Will the United States demand that Iraq pay reparations to us for the cost of this war? Will the attacking-not-attacked United States demand reparations even though our weapons caused mass destruction in Iraqi towns and cities and theirs none in ours?

9) Imagine that Iraq is found, in the course of the war, not to have weapons of mass destruction. The much-trumpeted "discoveries" so far have produced nothing much more than ambiguity. Since disarming Iraq was purportedly President Bush's primary reason for going to war, will the United States apologize and make amends to Iraq for the harm it did in acting on erroneous intelligence and false beliefs?

10) Will the United States be more successful in Iraq than we were in Afghanistan? Afghanistan is not now a democracy. The government we installed has little power outside Kabul. Farmers have returned to growing opium on a large scale. We still have not caught or killed Osama bin Laden although capturing or killing him was as much a reason for this first war as catching or killing Saddam Hussein is for this second one.

If the answer to even one of these questions is "No," we have a problem of justice. If the answer to all of them is "No," we will have the total absence of it.

Joseph Betz is a professor of philosophy at Villanova University and an expert on just-war theory.

Copyright © 2003 Philadelphia Inquirer

###