A while back, I fisked an article by Chomsky soul-brother George Monbiot.   I found an article by him recently and it appears he's experienced a change of heart about the Iraq war -

The dilemma the left must confront

...The survey the BBC conducted recently in Iraq is shocking to those of us who opposed the war. Most respondents say life is now better than it was before the invasion. Those who thought the United States was wrong to attack are outnumbered by those who thought it was right.

...Faced with this dreadful choice, a sort of moral numbness comes over us. To accept that force can sometimes be a just means of relieving the suffering of an oppressed people is to hand a ready-made excuse to every powerful nation that fancies an empire. To deny it is to tell some of the world's most persecuted peoples that they must be left to rot.

Mr. Monbiot is dang close to retracing the steps of Thomas Aquinas who spelled out important aspects of the Western / Christian doctrine of Just War.  Even from his perch in a monastery and deeply wrapped up in the literal Biblical messages of "turn the other cheek" and "love thy enemy", Aquinas nevertheless logically deduced that there were circumstances - including preemptive ones - where war was not just morally permissible but rather expressly called for.

Much to Monbiot's obvious chagrin, he's now discovering - 800 years after Aquinas - that you can't "outlaw" war / violence without implicitly "legalizing" certain, very abhorrent behaviors.  To stick your head in the sand and ignore that behavior is little different from offering it direct license.  Moreover, once you accept that War is sometimes necessary, you can no longer predicate an entire political philosophy with the assumption that the exercise of Power and pursuit of Justice are mutually exclusive.  In fact, we must recognize that Power - even the physical sort - is often created by the Just.

Seeing this light, Monbiot attempts to lay out a test for when / how to call in the artillery -

...We need a charter that permits armed intervention for humanitarian purposes, but only when a series of rigorous tests have been met, and only when an overwhelming majority of all the world's states have approved it. We need a charter that forbids nations with an obvious interest in the outcome from participating.

His first mistake is the one-nation, one-vote fallacy.  To assume that other nations should have an equal say as Liberal Democracies is a moral and cultural relativism of the worst kind.  Enough voting members of the UN are crap that simple majority voting and parliamentary procedure simply can't be trusted.  Even more directly, given that Monbiot now appears to be in favor of Iraqi invasion, one can safely say, that the majority of UN member nations are / were nevertheless opposed.  Monbiot's own policy wouldn't get approved by this test.

Or how about his request that we need a charter "that forbids nations with an obvious interest" from voting?  In our increasingly intertwined world, he's going to have an insanely difficlt time figuring out what nations have interests in the outcome (France and Russia, for ex., certainly made good $$$ off Iraqi Oil-For-Food).  He gives far too much credit to the impartiality of the supposedly uninvolved and far too little to those that actually have some skin in the game.

BUT, these are questions of tactics and procedure and are FAR secondary to the bigger issue.    One of the pinnacles of the moon-bat brigade of the Left now recognizes preemptive Just War's do exist.  I commend him for catching up 800 years & a conversation with him about "how" to pursue Iraq will have a far different tone vs. his earlier "Bush is a terrorist for employing war" mode.