A good friend and excellent writer, David Wall, had this to say on the war... (I concur with him, of course.)

It's an illegal war, not because of the de jure lack of a specific United Nations resolution endorsing the use of "any means necessary" in Iraq, but because the war fails to meet the accepted criteria for a just war. For lack of a better codification of what a just war is, we can consider the statement of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on the matter. Let's take the statement one element at a time.

"The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;"

We have to define "aggressor" liberally here. Saddam Hussein is obviously a bad guy, indeed one of the worst. His behaviour as a political leader is in opposition to generally accepted standards of human decency and civility. One could argue that his sympathies with terrorist groups — and despite the fact that there appears to be no particular love between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime, there is the "enemy of my enemy" phenomenon going on — constitute a "grave and certain" threat to humanity.

"All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;"

Eh. Ten years of a weak inspection regime (which involved AIRCRAFT only in its waning weeks, probably after the die was cast) was hardly an effective attempt at peaceful resolution.

"There must be serious prospects of success;"

Sure, the West will win. No question here. It may take a while, and be a bit messier than advertised, but they'll kill all the Saddam guys' hardware.

"The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition."

This is the problem. The evil spawned by the current operation will likely be far worse (and certainly more far-reaching) than the evil that existed in the previous totalitarian state. For sure, the West will face a heap of terrorist attacks, against Western military targets and against civilian interests all over the world. Resentment of the West will grow in the Muslim states, on the simple grounds that soldiers from the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia are occupying land that isn't rightfully theirs. Terrible damage has already been done to the United Nations (arguably the greatest political accomplishment of the post-WWII world) and to the NATO alliance.

Speaking of which, isn't it odd that neither U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell nor U.S. President Bush bothered to *visit* fence-sitters Russia or China during the run-up to the war? The level of hubris is shocking.

There was a time, a whopping 15 years ago, when the United States were the good guys, standing up to the demonstrably evil and obviously malignant Soviet Union. The West won that one, and properly so. Now, the country has embarked on something very close to a war of aggression, and it seems to be way out of line. The fact that the war may expand to other countries, as posited recently in the Wall Street Journal, presents a further complication.

It is a difficult time to be an American.