"Saddam HAD violated the terms of the ceasefire, and the US was authorized AND REQUIRED to act under the 1991 ( and later) UN resolutions."
As I recall, the UN didn't REQUIRE us to go to war.

But in spite of all these peripheral issues, the bottom line is this was -- is -- not a just war.

Melinda Henneberger of Newsweek says it better than I could, so I'll quote her:
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...A just war must also confront a danger that is beyond question. Even when Dick Cheney said we knew exactly where the WMDs were, even when Tony Blair said Iraq could deploy them within 45 minutes, even when Colin Powell said the evidence was good enough for him, the danger was never beyond question. It is true that, as Bush said in his address on Monday evening, Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror.

This was not the case, however, when we went in.

A just war must be a last resort. Which was not the case in Iraq, either. Remember the United Nations weapons inspectors who wanted just a few more weeks to do their work? Yet incredibly, on "Meet the Press" last Sunday, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, California Republican Duncan Hunter, suggested to Tim Russert that it was the U.N. inspectors who pushed us into Iraq. "We went to war … not on the statements of Mr. [Ahmad] Chalabi but on Hans Blix," head of the U.N. inspectors, "who talked about the 8,500 liters of anthrax that Saddam Hussein put together … all of which would fit, Tim, in one pickup truck with good sideboards." Here is what Blix actually said this of the possibility that there were chemical and biological weapons in Iraq when the war began: "One must not jump to the conclusion that they exist. However, this possibility is also not excluded."

A just war also must be proportional, so that the harm inflicted does not outweigh the good achieved. Surely one of the saddest quotes I have read in recent weeks came from an American military reservist who works in a prison in civilian life and was allegedly involved in the abuses at Abu Ghraib: "The Christian in me says it's wrong," he purportedly told the soldier who reported the abuses. "But the corrections officer in me says, "' love to see a grown man piss himself'." I'd really like to think that none of us is enjoying any part of this—including, among those who opposed the war, any sense that recent events are some kind of vindication, if there is any such thing, which I also tend to doubt. But aren't we all a little bit like that man, who shocks us not only with his cruelty but with his honesty? In a democracy, we are all to some extent morally complicit in the acts of our government and those who represent it.
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clint