Thursday, Aug 28, 2008
What Bush has in common with Henry V, and why Iraq was "ultimately a war of choice."
Jun 4, 2004 | As our anger, anguish and anxiety about Iraq continue to mount, I find myself looking for clarity and understanding not in the media's daily play-by-play, which confuses more than it illuminates (Did we win in Fallujah or get our butts kicked?), but rather in Shakespeare's "Henry V." I've found it contains far more truth about our present situation than anything coming out of the White House or the Pentagon.
The impetus for this rearward search for insight was an invitation to take part in a debate sponsored in Washington by the Shakespeare Theatre about the wisdom of King Henry V's decision to lead an English army into France in 1415.
The parallels between Shakespeare's wartime king and our current president, George II, are many and delicious -- from the pair's hard-partying younger days (Prince Hal was a 15th century feckless frat boy-prankster) to the challenge of following in a powerful father's footsteps right up to the critical matter of whether their wartime adventures made them courageous commanders or failed leaders.
The central question, then as now, was whether the invasion of another country was a war of choice or a war of necessity. If the answer is a war of choice -- and it is for both Henry and W -- then the inevitable conclusion is that both wars were immoral. For there can be no moral war of choice.
As Shakespeare has a commoner tell a disguised Henry on the night before the decisive battle at Agincourt: "If the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs, and arms, and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, 'We died at such a place.'"
King Henry, unlike W, who doesn't seem to lose any sleep over a heavenly reckoning, was so desperately worried about it that he worked hard to get the clergy to endorse his war. With the blessing of the Almighty's representatives on Earth secured, he could then invade France with a "conscience washed as pure as sin with baptism."
W didn't need such confirmation, since he has a direct line to the Almighty. Instead he did all he could to secure the backing of the closest thing we have to clergy in our secular political world, Colin Powell.
As the horrors of the war in Iraq are coming home to us every day -- 5,000 young American soldiers dead or wounded, liberators transformed into torturers, thousands of dead Iraqi civilians -- we're reminded again that wars are so dehumanizing that only actual threats, not imperial dreams, can justify embarking on them.
Shakespeare's play is full of the imagery of violence and aggression. In his speech before the battle of Harfleur, Henry urges his men to "imitate the action of the tiger ... disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage." In our own time we cloak the shattering of civilized restraint in the pretense that it's just "a few bad apples," not the impact of war itself, that explains the barbaric behavior. Shakespeare knew better.
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