Robert Fisk 31

'Robert Fisk on Shakespeare and war Shakespeare could have been writing about Iraq or Afghanistan, his scenes of battle were so prescient.
Robert Fisk dissects the Bard's attitude to conflict - and describes how relevant he has found it to be today.

Poor old Bardolph. The common soldier, the Poor Bloody Infantry, the GI Joe of Agincourt, survives Henry IV, only to end up on the end of a rope after he's avoided filling up the breach at Harfleur with his corpse. Henry V is his undoing - in every sense of the word - when he robs a French church. He must be executed, hanged, "pour encourager les autres". "Bardolph," laments his friend Pistol to Fluellen, "a soldier firm and sound of heart, /...hanged must a' be /A damned death! "Let gallows gape for dog, let man go free, / And let not hemp his wind-pipe suffocate: / But Exeter hath given the doom of death... / Therefore go speak, the duke will hear thy voice; / And let not Bardolph's vital thread be cut... / Speak, captain, for his life..."How many such military executions have been recorded in the past 30 years of Middle East history? For theft, for murder, for desertion, for treachery, for a momentary lapse of discipline. Captain Fluellen pleads the profoundly ugly Bardolph's cause - not with great enthusiasm, it has to be said - to Henry himself."I / think the duke hath lost never a man, but one that / is like to be executed for robbing a church, one / Bardolph, if your majesty know the man: his face is / all bubukles and whelks, and knobs, and flames o' / fire, and his lips blow at his nose..."But the priggish Henry, a friend of Bardolph in his princely, drinking days (shades of another, later Prince Harry), will have none of it:"We would have all such offenders so cut off: and we / give express charge that in our marches through the / country there be nothing compelled from the / villages; nothing taken but paid for; none of the / French upbraided or abused in disdainful language..."In France, Eisenhower shot post-D-Day rapists in the US army. The SS hanged their deserters even as Berlin fell. I have my notes of a meeting with Fathi Daoud Mouffak, one of Saddam Hussein's military cameramen during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, a sensitive man, a mere Pistol in the great retreat around Basra where a reservist was accused of desertion by an officer of the Iraqi "Popular Army". He was a very young man, Mouffak was to recall:"And the reporter from Jumhuriya newspaper tried to save him. He said to the commander: 'This is an Iraqi citizen. He should not die.' But the commander said: 'This is none of your business - stay out of this.' And so it was the young man's fate to be shot by a firing squad... before he was executed, he said he was the father of four children. And he begged to live. 'Who will look after my wife and my children?' he asked. 'I am a Muslim. Please think of Allah - for Saddam, for God, please help me... I am not a conscript, I am a reservist. I did not run away from the battle - my battalion was destroyed.' But the commander shot him personally - in the head and in the chest."'

Lees verder:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2403298.ece Of: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17448.htm