VATICAN CITY -- 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.

Brought to Rome by the U.S. State Department, Novak met privately Feb. 8 with Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican's equivalent of foreign minister, and officials of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and later detailed his Vatican presentation at a Feb. 10 Rome symposium organized by the U.S. Embassy to the Vatican.

Novak argued that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had disrupted international order by refusing to disarm and that Iraqi weapons risked falling into the hands of a new breed of international terrorists eager to strike countries around the world with no advance warning.

"A limited and carefully conducted war to bring about a regime change in Iraq is, as a last resort, morally obligatory," Novak said at the Rome symposium.

"For public authorities to fail to conduct such a war would be to put their trust imprudently in the sanity and good will of Saddam Hussein," he said.

The two-hour symposium, about half of which was dedicated to questions, was attended by some 150 invited guests, including lower-level Vatican officials, professors from church universities in Rome and diplomats accredited to the Vatican.

Novak said the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks "threw the behavior of Saddam Hussein into an entirely new light and enhanced the danger Saddam Hussein poses to the civilized world a hundredfold."

On one side, Iraq maintains weapons of mass destruction, and on the other, international terrorists are seeking to procure them.

"All that is lacking between these two incendiary elements is a spark of contact," Novak said.

"Given Saddam's proven record in the use of such weapons, and given his recognized contempt for international law, only an imprudent or even foolhardy statesman could trust that these two forces will stay apart forever. At any time they could combine, in secret, to murder tens of thousands of innocent and unsuspecting citizens," he said.

Such an attack, like the Sept. 11 attacks, would come without any of the normal criteria analyzed by just-war theorists to determine if a threat is sufficient to justify military action, "neither conventional military movements, nor visible signs of attack, nor the authority of a hostile nation state," he said.

The responsibility of determining whether Iraq poses a sufficient threat to justify war falls to civil leaders like U.S. President George W. Bush, Novak said, citing the "Catechism of the Catholic Church."

Not only do civil authorities have a primary duty to protect the lives of their people, but they are also the closest to the facts and are privy to highly restricted intelligence information, he said.

"Others have a right and duty to voice their own judgments of conscience. But the final judgment belongs to public authorities," he said.

U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican Jim Nicholson, who sat in on Novak's meeting with Archbishop Tauran, told Catholic News Service he was "very pleased" with how the private Vatican meetings went and said that "a good discussion ensued."

In recent months, a growing chorus of Vatican officials has warned against resolving the Iraqi disarmament problem through military means, saying the use of military force would not appear to be justified based on available evidence regarding Iraq's potential threat.

In January, Pope John Paul II spoke out against a possible war, telling Vatican-accredited diplomats that military force always must be "the very last option." He said that "war is not always inevitable" and is "always a defeat for humanity."

While in Italy, Novak also pressed his case before a wider audience, appearing Feb. 7 on a nationally televised evening talk show and giving Vatican Radio an extensive interview, which was broadcast in edited form Feb. 10 and posted in its entirety on the radio's One-O-Five Live Web site.

In the radio interview, Novak said his meetings in Rome were aimed at "trying to show why the argument being made in America today, at least as I see it, is not an argument based on preventive war ... but an argument based on traditional use of the just-war theory, a war of self-defense."

"The war's already here. We can't prevent it," he said.

Novak praised the Vatican's insistence that the Iraqi crisis be handled by the international community as a whole. He noted that Bush was seeking a second U.N. resolution authorizing force against Iraq.

"The absolutely best thing is complete agreement. But the moral principle stands whether there is complete international agreement or not," he said.

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.

Novak said a recent anti-war editorial in La Civilta Cattolica, a Jesuit journal reviewed before publication by the Vatican, was unfair in attributing hidden motives to the United States without also examining the possible motives of France, Germany, Russia and China.