[ This week marks 20 years since the U.S. invaded Iraq. Tens of
millions demonstrated worldwide to try to stop it. On Martin Luther
King holiday weekend, we thought back to what Dr. King warned about -
US militarism and its disastrous consequences.]
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WHAT WOULD KING SAY ABOUT IRAQ WAR  
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Michael Honey
January 16, 2003
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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_ This week marks 20 years since the U.S. invaded Iraq. Tens of
millions demonstrated worldwide to try to stop it. On Martin Luther
King holiday weekend, we thought back to what Dr. King warned about -
US militarism and its disastrous consequences. _

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President Bush seems determined to implement his new doctrine of
pre-emptive war, this time against Iraq (next time, who?). What would
Martin Luther King Jr. say?

Although King did not completely rule out the right to self-defense,
it is almost certain that he would not define bombing and invading
other countries as self-defense. Rather, he would warn us, as he did
in his life, about the evils of war and its futility as a way of
resolving conflict.

King said war inevitably wreaks havoc on civilians, accelerates
violence and obscures its causes by demonizing people as enemies in
order to justify killing them. His perceptive analysis of the Vietnam
War shredded the fallacy that war brings peace. Government leaders put
half a million American troops in Vietnam, terrorized the populace by
dropping more bombs on a country the size of Florida than all the
bombs dropped during World War II and called propping up dictators a
war for freedom. They justified it all in the name of fighting
communism, ignoring the cost of killing more than 2 million
Vietnamese, countless other Cambodians and Laotians and some 60,000
American soldiers.

King did not think it surprising that dispossessed people in countries
subjected to neo-colonial rule reacted to their impoverished
conditions with bombs and suicide attacks. Defining them merely as
enemies and using violence to destroy them, he said, made it
impossible to ameliorate the conditions that breed violence. "Someone
must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of
hate," he said, but apparently that someone today is not the U.S.
government.

The compassionate and self-critical scrutiny that King called for
seems to be furthest from the minds of the Bush administration. King
worried that such leaders "possess power without compassion, might
without morality and strength without sight," and so should we today.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld may be counting on a "cakewalk" (his
words) of a war, hoping that massive firepower against a vulnerable,
decimated country will minimize U.S. casualties. An easy defeat of the
Iraqi Army would not dispel King's moral objections, however. The
United Nations has predicted a humanitarian disaster and Arab
ministers have warned that U.S. war would "open the gates of hell"
throughout the Mideast, precipitating more terrorism and violence.

King said during the Vietnam War that "Americans are forcing even
their friends into becoming their enemies," and "in the process they
are incurring deep psychological and political defeat." We seem to be
doing much the same thing today.

King also warned that militarism fosters a pervasive atmosphere of
violence at home. As we confront gang wars, school shootings and other
senseless violence in our society today, how can we not be concerned
about the massive, state-sponsored violence modeled by our own
government, as it and American companies become arms merchants to the
world?

And, as King warned in 1968, military power exhausts resources needed
to create jobs, health care, housing, education and economic
infrastructure. As millions of Americans stand in food lines and as
AIDS and hunger proliferate across the globe, can't we imagine better
ways to make and use money?

As America plays both world arms merchant and policeman, the quest for
military control, as King put it, has placed us "on the side of the
wealthy and the secure while we create a hell for the poor." It seems
we truly are becoming a country where, as King warned, "machines and
computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more
important than people."

There is an alternative. Pursuing peace, economic redistribution and
racial, ethnic and international fairness, King thought, could combat
militarism, materialism and racism; it could insure that "the pursuit
of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war." We could
become, as historian Howard Zinn says, "a humanitarian superpower"
rather than a military juggernaut.

Why not try it? We ignore at our own great peril King's demand for
reordering our priorities so that we live up to our moral ideals.

_[MICHAEL HONEY is a labor and freedom movement historian. His most
recent book is To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight
for Economic Justice
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professor of humanities at the University of Washington Tacoma.]_

_Thanks to the author for sending this to xxxxxx. _

* Iraq War
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* Martin Luther King
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* MLK
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* Martin Luther King Jr.
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* peace movement
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* Vietnam War
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* Anti-Vietnam War movement
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* Bush administration
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* George W. Bush
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