From the Catholic News Service:

U.S. theologian Michael Novak made a case for war on Iraq to a skeptical Vatican audience, arguing that military action was justified under traditional self-defense principles and not under some new concept of preventive war.

Novak rejected accusations, including some made by Vatican sources, that the United States' true interest in Iraq was oil reserves, and he said some of the Vatican rhetoric seemed based in emotional, European anti-Americanism.

"If we wanted oil, why didn't we just take it 12 years ago (at the end of the Gulf War)?" he said.

"Europeans depend on Iraqi oil far more than we do," he said, noting that the United States now gets 6 percent of its oil from Iraq and 23 percent from the entire Middle East and was seeking to reduce even further its dependency on the region.