|
Justifying
War
 War is bad. Everyone
agrees on that, so why do wars keep happening?
 Because
man keeps
thinking up ingenious justifications for them. In the first act of
Shakespeare’s Henry V, the king of England
contemplates invading France to stake his claim that he’s the rightful
king of France too. He asks the Archbishop of Canterbury to judge his claim,
warning him to judge scrupulously, because a war would mean the deaths of
countless innocent people. This is sheer hypocrisy on Henry’s part,
because he has already decided to make war on any pretext he can come up
with; but never mind that for the moment. His words are excellent, even if
his motives are rotten.
A wave of democratization in the
Middle East — in Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, as well as Iraq —
is now encouraging supporters of President Bush’s I |
