Black and White, or Grey?

Salman Rushdie: Getting Into Gang War. Is the upcoming war with Iraq more like The Two Towers, a battle between pure good and pure evil, or is it more like Gangs of New York, an amoral struggle for "bare-knuckle power"? Rushdie chooses the latter comparison: "In short, we may be in for a gang war on a gigantic scale, and yet, as in Scorsese's movie, that gang war, brutal, cynical, atavistic — a war in which one man's hero is another's villain — may paradoxically succeed in bringing a more modern world into being." Of course, it might succeed in doing exactly the opposite.