Necessary War?

I'm sick and tired of the idea that we shouldn't go to war "unnecessarily." I *might* accept this concept, if it weren't racist and patently ludicrous OR if people understood necessity as more than greed and selfishness.

The argument goes something like this, "We didn't have to go to war in Iraq, so we shouldn't have." I will now proceed to attack this argument from several directions.

1) We didn't have to go to war in Rwanda, either, and we didn't, and 1 million innocent people died. How is this good? What if we had gone, and 10,000 US soldiers and 100,000 Rwandans had been killed in the ensuing several years of violence. Would that have been worse? If so, how? Unless the loss of *any* American lives outweighs the loss of 1 million Rwandan lives, which smacks of racism. Millions of innocents died as a result of wars Saddam started, or because he gassed them. Therefore, how could we NOT have removed him from power, unless we're saying that we don't care if millions of Iraqis die. That's how many Americans think. And then we wonder why everyone else thinks we're arrogant.

2) If we want to have international rules, don't they have to be enforced? If they are to be enforced, then don't we have an obligation to enforce them? No one was enforcing UN regulations on Iraq. We did.

3) The concept of "just" war has been around a long time. Necessary war is not really an interesting concept. A Just War, whether offensive or defensive, is one that passes the tests of morality. The only test of justness of war which even kind of sounds like "necessity" is the idea that war should be a last resort. Iraq started flaunting the regulations imposed upon it in 1993 and escalated their violations in 1998. No one was able to do anything about it. The situation was worsening, the sanctions regime was collapsing, Saddam had slaughtered Shi'ites AFTER the first Gulf War and was pursuing a genocidal policy toward the Kurds. I don't know whether there were any peaceful options left. Can you think of any reasonable ones?