Mick Hartley

The Times’ Modern Morals feature usually involves moral dilemmas so contrived and/or trivial that one suspects them of being inventions by bored Times journalists – which is not to say that they can’t on occasion be quite amusing. Today’s topic, though, is of, I think, wide-ranging application:

I am a post-Second World War baby, fiercely opposed to the Iraq War. My opposition is so great – and has been since 2003 – that I listen to the news on radio and television hoping that Britain and the United States will lose. Does that make me unpatriotic? Should I perhaps swallow my doubts and say: “Now that our boys are there, good luck to them”?

Unpatriotic? What an odd perspective – that being unpatriotic should be the major concern here.

The wishes and hopes of the Iraqi people, needless to say, don’t figure in this moral calculus.