The Afghans themselves have valiantly done their bit: they established an interim government, then held a loya jirga, or grand council, to set up a more legitimate administration.
Haiti needs a legitimate government chosen in a legitimate election.
Whatever her flaws, Miss Megawati still seems to be the only presidential candidate capable of forming the popular and legitimate administration Indonesia needs to get it through the difficult years ahead.
Using such broad definitions to determine who was a "combatant" and therefore a legitimate target allowed Obama administration officials at one point to claim that the escalation of drone strikes in Pakistan had not killed any civilians for a year.
Or is this a legitimate effort to allow administration officials to hear teachers complaints (even though they've had many months to invite them to the White House, and even though officials have some other pressing business — like the debt limit crisis — to deal with)?
That prospect helped persuade Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who wrote for the court's five-member majority, that the travel ban was not, as critics argued, an expression of the administration's anti-Muslim bigotry but rather a legitimate national security measure, as the administration insisted.
The Trump administration, like the Obama administration before it, has a legitimate complaint against China on aluminum.
By coercing providers into silence on abortions as a legitimate family planning option, the Trump administration renders Title X hollow.
Whether the administration acted on a legitimate need for information on the noncitizen population or on a desire to limit voting power.
"If you don't have imminence, you'd have to show that you'd have due process," he continued, adding that while the administration could have a legitimate due process procedure, secrecy clouds the process from public view.
When I asked him whether Mr. Obama had a legitimate point — whether his brother's administration did, in fact, bear responsibility for the country's economic collapse — Mr. Bush paused and, for the only time in our interview, appeared to carefully assemble his words.
