There may be no room for pride in war, only penitence; there may be no room for pre-emption in war, only response. (A righteous combatant will not strike a first blow, because she or he doesn’t know that the adversary actually is a combatant until the adversary starts the fight.) The Bush administration’s actions in North Korea illustrate that there are indeed other ways of addressing unstable tyrants who possess weapons of mass destruction. When Bush singles out Hussein and Iraq as “deserving” a pre-emptive war that will surely affect non-combatants disproportionately (perhaps even deliberately so), his selectivity falsifies any claim that this could be a “just” war.