A friend of mine recently said that he didn't think there was any way to question the morality of our recent (and continuing) action in Iraq. My quick response was that no one could question the righteousness of our action.

This being the Sunday between the Easters ("regular" and Orthodox), I thought I'd illustrate the difference between righteousness and morality using "the Jesus story."

If you grew up going to church, chances are you heard how the nasty Pharisees ganged up on Jesus, bribed Judas, turned Jesus over to the Romans and let him get crucified. I always thought that Judas and the Pharisees were the heroes of the story, since if Jesus didn't get crucified (and subsequently rise from the dead--however you wish to interpret that statement) there would be no Christianity. This interpretation was not a popular one.

In any case, it's interesting to note who and what the Pharisees were. If they were around today, we'd call them fundamentalists. While the Saduccees ran the temple in Jerusalem (and controlled Jewish life in Judea in general), the Pharisees worked their butts off to undermine both the Romans and the Saduccees. Contrary to the way my teachers related the story to me, the Pharisees were competitors of Jesus and his followers, and not actually people in charge of anything. They often committed guerrilla raids against symbols of Roman power.

Strange as it may seem, Monty Python presented a more accurate portrait of the time in Life of Brian than anything I ever heard in church. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Pharisees saw Jesus as a threat and conspired to have him eliminated. It didn't matter, of course: Some thirty-odd years later the Romans crushed a full-blown rebellion and wiped out most overt symbols of Jewish culture.

The thing is, the Pharisees saw Jesus as both a political and a heretical threat. Their anger with him was righteous anger. He was teaching ideas that they found dangerous, which was bad enough. When he began to attract scads of followers, they knew they had to nip his movement in the bud.

Didn't work, as evidenced by the plethora of Christian churches around the world. The Pharisees also believed the world was going end real soon. The Pharisees were wrong about a lot of things.

I'm sure you can find an American who believes that it's a damned shame the war ended quickly and that the relatively quick capitulation of the Saddam Hussein was a great tragedy. Most folks who oppose the war don't go that far in their self-flagellation, with good reason. I believe that quick wars are better than long ones, and I also believe that the fewer people killed, the better. The speed and efficiency of the way does not, in my mind, make it any more justified. It does, of course, make the war more palatable. Which is an entirely different matter.

But even if those nations who opposed us fall in line after the war in order to get on the gravy train (like, say, France and Germany), a preemptive action such as the one we took still isn't in our country's best interest. There has never been a military machine as strong and capable as the one fielded by the United States today. By our action in Iraq, we have just told the world that we'll take out anyone we don't like. Which disturbs those people who don't happen to be American and share the American notion of right and wrong.

What would we do if a major power decided it didn't like our leadership and attacked us? Look at the War of 1812 (whose causes were a bit more complicated, but still) and you get your answer. The British burned Washington, D.C., but eventually we drove them off. The truth is that no nation likes to be bullied. And no matter how righteous our cause, when we use force like we did in Iraq we're acting like a bully.

Of all the people of the world, Americans tend to embrace the underdog. They ought to understand the concept of putting someone in his place. In a lot of ways, that's what the terrorists who target our people and our country are doing. I'm not saying that killing people--innocent or not--is right. It's not. But I understand why it happens.

I'm not so overly pessimistic as to assume that the nations of the world will snub us. The Prez and his buddies read their Macchiavelli well, and the chips are falling into the proper slots. The more important question is how the "little people" of the world will respond. Those are the folks who are most likely to take up arms (generally as what we might call terrorists) against us. They are the people who are most likely to bring harm to our nation. And they are the people whom we cannot be assured of stopping, no matter how much security is imposed upon the homeland.

We may have whacked off one head of the beast, but we have no idea how many more will sprout from its bloody neck.

Jon Worley has written this column every week for the last month. This is the first version that he thinks is palatable enough for mass consumption.