You’d think the nightmare unfolding in Iraq would make Catholic supporters of the war — and particularly the relatively few Catholic traditionalists who supported it — have second thoughts, since everything we antiwar people said would happen has happened in spades. Our leaders have swaggered, lied, bullied, and in general embarrassed all normal Americans with some of the stupidest and most destructive behavior the executive branch has ever seen — and that’s saying something.

This is a fiasco with no good ending and hundreds of billions of dollars down the toilet, but traditionalists who should know better than to latch on to utopian schemes have for some reason latched on to this “war on terrorism” (the very idea of a “war” on a disembodied phenomenon not exactly being a defining characteristic of conservative thinking). In turn, they’ve condemned as softies those of us who disagree, despite the fact that it is they, not we, who supported a war justified on the basis of UN resolutions.

How one could reach the conclusion that the war in Iraq was just, particularly given what we now know about the trumped-up rationale for it, is simply beyond me. But here you are.

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