Two troubling assertions here. 1 is that all wars of choice aren't bad. What is a good war of choice? Seems to me that if you go to war when you don't have to, you're doing something bad.

Second is that the first Gulf War was something we were forced into. Saddam Hussein didn't threaten any American lives by invading Kuwait. I'd really like you to unpack your assertion that Gulf War I wasn't a war of choice.

Here's my case that it was:

1) We created and armed Saddam Hussein in the first place. Had we not done that, no problem.

2) We gave Hussein the impression that we'd let him invade Kuwait. If we had resolutely told him not to attack Kuwait in the first place, he probably wouldn't have. After the Iran-Iraq war, he thought he had license. We could have prevented the invasion in the first place.

2) We could have let him have Kuwait. I'm not sure why we wasted money, time and lives on the freedom of a dictatorship.

3) The big argument that I remember at the time was that Saudi Arabia was next. We could have easily prevented that without going to war.

There is insight here amidst confustication.

Of course, from a standpoint of the national interest of the U.S., neither so-called "war" was a necessity; both were foreign distractions intended to repackage a weak unelected president as a "war leader".

But there were also crucial differences. Afghanistan in '01 was a unique opportunity to strike a unified targeted multilaterally-supported and globally-coordinated blow at fanatical terrorism. In contrast, Iraq in '03 was an opportunity to engage in massive and reckless unilateral incompetence. The Afghanistan liberation exploited international sympathy after 9-11. The cocked-up cakewalk to Baghdad squandered it.

Now these differences have in some ways been reversed, and to an extent -this being author Haass' valid illumination- not yet reflected in Obama Admin. policies. The long term U.S. role in Iraq now gives it a limited but not insignificant opportunity to influence, to its advantage, relations between Iran and Arabia, between Shias, Sunnis and the West, and between oil importing and oil exporting countries. A horrendous, outrageous and disastrously exorbitant price was paid for this opportunity, but those are sunk costs now.

In Afghanistan, however, as with Iraq in 2002, there is now only a set of choices from amongst bad options. Bush and Cheney had nothing remotely like a plan for either place, of course, but the consequences of their incompetence are now most grievous in the country where that incompetence was least egregious. Having won the "war" in Afghanistan, America is now losing the "peace", and having failed to develop an exit strategy is becoming bogged down like the Russians 25-30 years ago. Obama needs to come up with something much cleverer than trying to do now, years too late, what should have been done after the fall of Kabul.

In 2001-02 there was a clear generally accepted strategy for Afghanistan, but no clear way forward for policy on Iraq (despite the co-opting of Colin Powell as the chickenhawks' propaganda tool). Now, in a rough sense, the roles are reversed. There is little choice but to stay the course of slow disengagement from Iraq. The conunumdrum now, as with Saddam in 2002, is what do in Afghanistan.

A crucial difference between then and now remains, however: Having rubberstamped Cheney and Bush's squandered opportunities in both countries for 8 years, Democrats are now in charge of things, but with no opportunities for massive squandering on their watch (in THIS sector of international policy, at any rate). They will have to now show atypical courage and vision in order to not be dragged down by the overseas messes they have inherited.

A postscript regarding the tangential but raised issue of the 1991 Gulf War (an actual war, albeit brief, unlike the Orwellian "war" in Iraq since 2003):

There was, of course, a choice in 1991, and it was the subject of a spirited televised debate in the Congress. It is not, however, clear that deciding against using military force to liberate Kuwait would have been the wiser choice; indeed the preponderance of evidence since then suggests otherwise.

What is much clearer, though, is that to oppose the carefully planned, multilateral, UN-sanctioned limited collective security action of 1991, and to then support the unilateral internationally condemned pre-emptive mad rush to unplanned, blunder-ridden nation-building in 2002-03 constitutes one of the most asinine inconsistencies of all time. Democrats who supported John Kerry in 2004 and were surprised by his loss in the presidential election ought not to have been.

Call it what it is:
An unnecessary war of aggression against the only secular regime in the Middle East.

I argue in the book that the first Iraq war was a war of necessity while the second was a war of choice.

A revealing choice of formulation.

I would go for distinguishing between a just war and an illegal war of aggression, but that's just me with my quaint admiration for the UN founders who saw the world this way too.

I understand that, literally, anyone has a choice to fight any particular war. But surely the issue at hand is actually whether the choice to wage war is lawful in the circumstances. (And if it isn't lawful, what are/should be the consequences?)

As to the continuing occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, this does not neatly sit under the [just-illegal] choice-necessity war framework. We are in both countries in part on the invitation of the local government (that the government is propped up through our presence makes this a nice circular argument, and bears an obvious resemblance to Soviet policy in Eastern Europe), so I would be quite hesitant to classify these as wars of choice. They are a lot of other things, not least a hotly debated policy choice, but they don't very well fit the definition of a war.

So I guess my questions are these. How do the influential DC policy forums define the type of "war" being fought by troops in Afghanistan and Iraq? And does the concept of a just war exist in the DC policy lexicon?

I've sometimes wondered if in fact Bush Pere went to war against Saddam Hussein for the exact same reason Bush Junior did - to win reelection. Bush Pere always seemed totally surprised by the speed with which Saddam Hussein was defeated in Gulf I. With such a speedy and easy victory, the US electorate was given a chance to forget all of the details of Bush Pere's glorious win and focus on his domestic policy ineptitude, resulting in his 1992 loss to Clinton. If Bush Pere's war had yielded a real battle over a real period of time, they would have been able to use the warming glow of that "victory" to fuel their reelection. Too bad for Bush Pere the victory feelings blew away like smoke in a desert sandstorm.

Bush Junior didn't forget that and knew that he needed a war to be able to even consider reelection. We know that definitively now. His domestic policies were failing, as we also now know from the job creation statistics we're shown constantly for the period 2001-2003. Unfortunately, Bush Junior didn't get the war he thought he'd get - his old man's war, nice and clean and quick. He became a war pResident alright, which enabled his slim win over Kerry in 2004 and is condemning him to historical hell. But, he needed that war just like his dad did. They were both wars of choice, from the same soulless family. God help us when JEB Bush gets coughed up on the American political scene.