I remember seeing the “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad unfold in the spring of 2003, watching CNN with officemates on the lunchroom TV. I was working in Boston as a software engineer, still a year and a half away from entering the Jesuit novitiate.

As I remember it, the tone of media coverage was excited, as we watched weapons rain down on the Iraqi capital. There had been a long rhetorical build-up to the second Gulf War, including a dramatic presentation made by Colin Powell, then the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to the United Nations Security Council, laying out details of an Iraqi weapons program that turned out to have been based on unreliable intelligence reports. Mr. Powell later said he regretted that the speech “will always be a part of my record.”

I also remember excitement about the means of war. “Smart bombs” and GPS-guided munitions were relatively new then, and there was a sense of confidence that American technological superiority would make victory possible with minimal collateral damage. Whether or not the more sophisticated weaponry limited some of the damage initially inflicted on the Iraqi people, the far more lasting damage of the war turned out to be the destruction of stability in Iraq, leading to almost two decades of U.S. military presence in that country and nearly 200,000 Iraqi civilian casualties, as well as contributing to the rise of ISIS and the civil war in Syria.

Looking back on those memories now, I regret that I joined in that excitement, both on the technological front and in terms of accepting the justification for the war. It would be one thing if my acceptance had been primarily political or even due to a lack of attention to the arguments about the grounds for war—but I knew there were significant moral questions and that the church was speaking out against the rush to war.

Addressing the Vatican diplomatic corps in January 2003, just months before the war, St. John Paul II specifically addressed “the threat of a war which could strike the people of Iraq” and said clearly, “War is never just another means that one can choose to employ for settling differences between nations.” He went on to remind the assembled diplomats that under international law and the U.N. charter, war could not be chosen “except as the very last option and in accordance with very strict conditions, without ignoring the consequences for the civilian population both during and after the military operations.”

There were other Catholic thinkers who made a case for attacking Iraq, twisting themselves into pretzels to explain how Iraq’s alleged weapons program constituted aggression and an imminent threat that, they argued, could morally justify a pre-emptive war according to Catholic just war theory. Confronted with the Vatican’s clear rejection of that position, they responded that the evaluation of particular threats and questions of necessity and proportionality in use of military force were judgments beyond the competence of religious leaders and could be made only by political authorities.

I was aware of both sides of these arguments in 2003, and I am ashamed to say that at the time, I accepted that tortured explanation, one that essentially allowed me to respond to the clear teaching of the Holy Father by saying to myself, “Well, of course the pope should call for peace; but when push comes to shove on geopolitical questions, he needs to stay in his lane.”

With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see that the pope was far more clear-eyed than the politicians who opted for war in Iraq and the Catholic thinkers who helped provide the war’s putative justification. If I had been reading America at the time, which I sadly was not, I would have been familiar with the clear explanation by Drew Christiansen, S.J., in the March 24, 2003, issue of the magazine of how the moral case for what was really a preventive (rather than pre-emptive) war and rejection of the pope’s caution was flawed both in principle and in its particular application to Iraq.

Father Christiansen would later serve as editor in chief of America from 2005 to 2012, and passed away in 2022. His picture hangs on the wall above my desk alongside the other former editors in chief, and I wish we could benefit from his wisdom regarding the war in Iran that the United States and Israel have just begun with far less consideration, prudence and moral caution than was applied even in the flawed case for the 2003 war in Iraq.

The moral clarity that we learned from Father Christiansen’s example is, I hope, reflected in the editorial America ran online on Monday, March 2, arguing that the administration’s apparent reasoning for the war “not only fails to meet the criteria for military action in any formulation of just war theory or international law, it also fails the test of common sense.” As the war in Iran widens and as we pray for its swift conclusion, may we also recognize that it requires more courage to return to peace even when it is uncertain and unstable than it does to cling to the false security of a bad argument for going to war.

Sam Sawyer, S.J., is the editor in chief of America Media.