War and morality.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: Bishop Tom Frame wrote on "Ideology, Morality and the War in Iraq" (September 2003). Appeals to morality are not new. As a student, I was told that "morality is not the law", but thankfully, I gain increasing respect for laws that have long been codified from moral precepts. Your author has made a wide survey of this issue--more so than I can adequately address in so short a letter. However, for the convenience of your readers, I can only refer them to an earlier treatise. Joan Didion's essay "On Morality", from her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem, lends a certain piquancy to literature on current events. Her ideas are still fresh and should be revisited as we turn towards Babylon. Didion wrote during another war in 1965:

 
   You see I want to be quite 
   obstinate about insisting that we 
   have no way of knowing--beyond 
   that fundamental loyalty 
   to the social code--what is 
   "right" and what is "wrong", 
   what is "good" and what "evil". 
   I dwell so upon this because the 
   most disturbing aspect of 
   "morality" seems to me to be the 
   frequency with which the word 
   now appears; in the press, on 
   ...