Last week, Dan McCarthy drew attention to an important essay by Prof. Robert Koons:

For the sake of argument, Koons grants the worst-case scenario about Iran’s intentions and capabilities, but still finds the case falls far short at present.

Koons makes a persuasive case that an attack on Iran wouldn’t be just even if everything that Iran hawks claim about the Iranian regime is true. Since many of the things that Koons grants for the sake of argument are not true, this makes the argument against a war against Iran even stronger. Let’s review what it is that Koons grants:

For the sake of argument, I will assume in this essay the worst possible case: namely, that the Iranian government is intent on pursuing the creation of nuclear weapons, and that there is a significant likelihood that Iran would either use these weapons directly against the United States or Israel, or give them to hostile terrorist groups such as Hamas or Hezbollah.

If attacking Iran wouldn’t be justified under these circumstances, which represent the core assumptions of the pro-war argument, how much less would it be justified when none of these three things is true? The idea that the Iranian government would first go to enormous expense to develop nuclear weapons and then hand them off to its proxies is a fantasy. Paul Pillar listed the reasons why in his recent article outlining why an Iranian war is unnecessary:

Kroenig includes among his “coulds” a scary possibility that also served as a selling point of the Iraq War: the thought of a regime giving nuclear weapons or materials to a terrorist group. Nothing is said about why Iran or any other regime ever would have an incentive to do this. In fact, Tehran would have strong reasons not to do it [bold mine-DL]. Why would it want to lose control over a commodity that is scarce as well as dangerous? And how would it achieve deniability regarding its role in what the group subsequently did with the stuff? No regime in the history of the nuclear age has ever been known to transfer nuclear material to a nonstate group [bold mine-DL]. That history includes the Cold War, when the USSR had both a huge nuclear arsenal and patronage relationships with a long list of radical and revolutionary clients. As for deniability, Iranian leaders have only to listen to rhetoric coming out of the United States to know that their regime would immediately be a suspect in any terrorist incidents involving a nuclear weapon.

The possibility of a “rogue” state giving nuclear weapons to a terrorist group is a frightening one, but it is also one of the least likely things that would happen once a regime acquires such weapons (the only less likely thing being a suicidal first-strike attack that would result in the regime’s annihilation). Pillar does not address it in his article, but what no one ever bothers to ask is why Hizbullah or Hamas would want to set off a nuclear weapon on their doorstep if they had the opportunity to do so. Advocates for an Iranian war want to dismiss fears of Iranian retaliation through its proxies in the wake of an Israeli and/or U.S. attack, so they sometimes cite a statement from Hizbullah’s leadership that it would not have seized the Israeli soldiers in 2006 if it had known that their capture would result in the major military campaign that followed. At the same time, war advocates expect us to believe that this group would be willing to start a nuclear war with its neighbor despite the far more devastating retaliation that would follow.

As Dan points out, R.R. Reno’s response to the essay is narrowly focused on Koons’ discussion of the need for a Congressional declaration of war. Reno writes:

All-in-all, I think Koons misconceives the political importance of Congressional declaration of war with a moral importance. Our constitutional constraints on the declaration of war are legal mechanisms designed to ensure accountability and prevent our President from conducting private wars that do not serve the national interest. Formal declaration of war brings our foreign policy above board. Yes, that would clarify things for the Iranians, but as I observed we can make things clear in other ways. The real importance is domestic. Citizens need to know when our leaders have committed military force, because at the end of the day it’s our blood and treasure that’s on the line.

Reno seems not to have understood what Koons has said about the need for a declaration of war, and he seems to have skipped over the passage that links the principles of last resort and competent authority together. Koons wrote:

The application of the last resort and the competent authority conditions are connected. War, even when there is a just cause, must always be the last resort, used only when all just and peaceful attempts to prevent aggression with an appropriate chance of success have failed. The necessity of competent authority follows necessarily, since only a sovereign state can engage in discussions and negotiations with the required credibility, and only a sovereign state can declare, prior to its attack, that a state of war exists.

Koons’ point here is fairly straightforward: a war cannot be just if it cannot meet the standards of competent authority and last resort. As he explains in the quote that Reno cited, the executive is not the competent authority in our constitutional system for inaugurating a war, especially a “preventive” war of the kind envisioned here. Competent authority is one of the moral requirements of just war theory because it is essential that the decision to wage war is lawful and legitimate. A state cannot be waging a just war if it violates its own constitutional norms in order to wage it. This doesn’t touch on questions of international law, which create additional obstacles to starting a war with Iran, but Koons’ argument doesn’t require appealing to international law.