Today is my last day of Shakespeare class, and my final day of classes in general is two days away on this Wednesday. I’m once again going to skip a day of blogging and instead post my homework as today’s blog entry, but I should be done doing this in the very near future and will return to blogging normally.

My Homework for Your Reading Pleasure

After reading and watching Shakespeare’s King Henry V, we wrote a relevant essay about how King Henry V started a war and connected it to America’s involvement in the war in Iraq.

I think that regardless of if someone was for or against preemptive war, during our initial invasion back in 2003 when the war began, people did not necessarily see it as a preemptive war. As stated by the Roman Catholic Church, if the “damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations [is] lasting, grave, and certain,” the war is not preemptive and is instead defensive. After the events that occurred on September 11, 2011, most people probably saw the invasion as more of a retaliation than anything else, and they felt as if it was justified because we were inflicting revenge on something that would stay in our history as something that caused great harm to our nation.

Another condition in the Roman Catholic Church’s tradition is that “the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.” Back in 2003, some of our main intentions for the invasion were to remove weapons of mass destruction and remove a tyrannical head of government. One could argue that because these two items could potentially cause extremely great harm and evil to people if not disarmed, the amount of force we were using was fully justified and that we were doing this for the better good rather than preemptively just for the greed.

Back in 2003, because people were in the mindset described above, they would have most likely seen Henry V as a good play that closely resembles the success and honor that Americans are going to see in the near future. King Henry V constantly makes references to his Christian God and says that God is on their side. After he is victorious, he says that God was the one who fought the battle for him and gave them enough fortune to make the battle turn out to be a victory. This is very similar to the American’s beliefs when they wanted to overthrow the tyranny; they believed that their practices were unholy and unreligious, and they wanted to make sure that all the evil was eliminated.

However, people have a tendency to apply current-day beliefs, values, and morals to things they think about, and if they were to think about King Henry V today, they would have different opinions that reflect our view rom today. Now that the war has carried on into 2011 and has become the longest war in United States history, people are becoming more hesitant to support it because it appears like we are not making much progress, and the only news we are receiving frequently is the news of soldiers dying during battle.

Now that the war is glistening under a negative light, people are less likely to support it, and will be less likely to be supportive of King Henry V’s plans as well because they will likely see a greater parallel between the violence, destruction, and death rather than the parallel of goodness and religion that they used to see. Those who are against our invasion would probably cite that we do not have a “serious prospect of success,” as stated by the Roman Catholic Church, and that we are only wasting our time by being persistent with our invasion if not all the conditions of war are met.