"The Pope likes the UN because he's not sold on GWB's 'preventive strikes' concept. There's a good reason for that: 'preventive strikes' are hard to square with the Just War theory. You may recall that theory--it has to do with morality in war"
Twenty-five million people were rescued from a thirty-year long reign of terror--with very little loss of civilian life. It is ridiculous to interpret this as something immoral. Had Saddam not been a known tyrant, a man who fed people into a giant shredder, a man who tortured children before their parents, a man who cut out tongues and cut off hands, a man who forced husbands to watch wives being raped, a man who used poison gas on scores of thousands of Iraqis, a man who invaded neighboring countries, a man who for twelve years made a mockery of the terms of his surrender following the First Gulf War--then maybe the Pope would have a point in his opposition.
As it is, the just-war principle that a threat must be imminent before a country may act preventively is no longer realistic in the nuclear age. One miscalculation on our part could well cause the loss of hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives. This is especially true when a madman like Saddam opposes us. As Bush insists, we may not have found weapons of mass destruction--but we found the capacity to produce them, and produce them quickly should the time have proved propitious.
With this, and your concluding graph, you simply place more distance between yourself and the Church.
Bush played the war right up to the edge and it is still not very clear how Iraq 'attacked us' first.
While I give Bush the benefit of the doubt, your belief that the USA is the World's Cop is arrogant, puerile, and hubristic in the extreme.
They are still under Muslim rule. They don't know Christ. They are no better off.