Shakespeare Turns A Spotlight On Bush And Iraq
SHAKESPEARE TURNS A SPOTLIGHT ON BUSH AND IRAQ
By Arianna Huffington
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 by The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C.,
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 they were both immoral wars. 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, which explains the barbaric behavior. Shakespeare knew better.
There are always atrocities committed in the course of battle. That's what
war does to people, which is why we're not supposed to fight wars of
choice.
When Tim Russert asked Bush on "Meet the Press" — "Do you believe the war
in Iraq is a war of choice or a war of necessity?" — the president's
initial response was, "I think that's an interesting question. Please
elaborate on that a little bit."
So no matter how many "good causes" he tried to string together — WMD,
yellowcake, Saddam's phantom ties to al-Qaida and 9/11, Saddam's torture
chambers, Saddam's mass graves, an outpost of democracy in the Middle East
— in the end, this was ultimately a war of choice.
The dying Henry IV had told his son to engage in foreign wars to distract
the people from domestic crises: "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels."
The invasion of France is supposed to turn frivolous Hal into a strong
leader — his youthful indiscretions a thing of the past.
Both men surrounded themselves with those in favor of going to war: Bush
with his neocons, and Henry with the churchmen my fellow debater David
Brooks dubbed the "theocons."
And both the president and the king were motivated by personal animus
toward their enemy. Henry becomes enraged when the Dauphin sends him a
gift of tennis balls: "This mock of his/Hath turned his balls to
gun-stones." For his part, Bush was clearly furious that Saddam had once
tried to have Bush's Daddy assassinated. It was so personal, he now keeps
the gun Saddam was captured with in a study next to the Oval Office as a
souvenir. But responding to perceived personal slights or settling old
family scores is no justification for sending young soldiers to die.
Contemplating the invasion of France, Henry V says, "France being ours,
we'll bend it to our awe/Or break it all to pieces." Iraq gave us shock
and awe, and Powell's Pottery Barn rule: "You break it, you own it." We
did — and now we do. And we'll be paying it off for years and years and
years.
In Henry V's time, history was much slower to cast its verdict. It took 30
years for England to lose control of France and dissolve into civil war.
In the end, Henry “lost France and made his England bleed.”
The verdict on Iraq is already in: George II has lost the war, emboldened
our enemies and made America bleed.
© 2004 ARIANNA HUFFINGTON.
www.fanaticsandfools.org
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