“A time comes when silence is betrayal MARTIN LUTHER KING AND THE IRAQ WAR “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” [1]

By David S Ayliffe

In the last few days I’ve come to the point of realizing I can no longer remain silent on the Iraq question and what seems to be the madness of the American administration push for War.

We are told, by those who argue against the argument, that we don’t know everything – that perhaps our leaders know things that we don’t. Perhaps so, but we do know something of history and history is available to us.

So aside from sending hosts of emails to politicians in the last few days I’ve spent time on the internet researching what is available and I was amazed to stumble on a speech of Martin Luther King against the war in Vietnam and spoken nearly 4 decades ago. Change some of the words, some of the places and it’s so relevant today.

Martin Luther King is remembered as one of the western world’s greatest heroes. Who doesn’t link “I have a dream” with him? It took the United States 20 years to come to the point of being able to honour him with a national holiday. “Martin Luther King Day” has been celebrated every year since 1986 on his birthday January 20. The establishment of this day was a great victory. It celebrated not only King’s achievements for civil rights but enshrined his method of achieving it. King’s war was against racial intolerance and social division in his country and his battle plan was contrary to the very nature of man who has always fought with sticks and rocks and bigger sticks and bigger rocks and finally with things that went bang in the night.

King would have learned like the rest of us that “Survival of the fittest” was one of the key lessons of the schoolyard. The one who runs hardest, fights strongest, and shouts loudest, wins. It’s a pattern of life that doesn’t change even as people grow older. In the animal kingdom the weakest is trodden on and dies. Human beings are supposed to be a little better, but because we’re not, sometimes we’re a lot worse.

Yet Martin Luther King was an amazing man because he turned his back on the lessons of the schoolyard. He fought his battles with a policy of passive resistance. It was the same policy that led Gandhi to bring cataclysmic change to his country India, and there’s no doubt India would be a better place if another Gandhi lived today. King’s battle was with the evil of the human heart – it was waged against decent, God-fearing American people who suffered from an impediment in the eye. They saw blacks as something less than human. It was an enormous battle to change hearts.

Had King fought racism with the same methods employed by the terrorists of his day – the Ku Klux Klan – I dare say the battle would still be raging now and white and black men, women and children would still be losing their lives for that war.

Global terrorism, it’s the new war. It’s precursor, Guerilla Warfare was introduced in the Korean War. It was tough because you never knew who your enemy was, or where he or she was hiding. Sometimes the enemy was a child. The bullets, or knives could come at you from anywhere in a 360 degree radius. No-where was safe. It was a different style of warfare but terrorism takes it to the next level. It’s an even greater degradation of the human spirit and makes for an even stranger war.

For once the mighty powers of the world, who think they are invincible, literally become powerless. The terrorist is the enemy you can’t see. No uniform. No place of fixed abode. No rules and no limits. Great food for paranoia.

What drove McCarthyism in America in the 50′s was the paranoia of Communism which had everyone looking for “reds under their beds” and distrusting anything that moved. It was a great way to learn once again how to hate and distrust anyone different. Communists were characterized as not-people, the enemy within and without.

Then came Vietnam, the war that could never be truly won. The cowboy rhetoric of the world’s most powerful man is that “we are so powerful that no-one can stand in our way”. Not so. Have we, America and her allies, including “the no greater friend” Australia, learnt nothing by the 21st century?

America is hell-bent on its military capability. Jacqueline Cabasso, executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation and co-author of The End of Disarmament and the Arms Races to Come writes: “The U.S. military budget, at nearly $400 billion a year ($396.1 billion for FY 2003) is larger than the military budgets of the next 26 countries combined ($394.2 billion); and 35 times larger than the combined military budgets of the “Axis of Evil” countries (Iraq, Iran and North Korea — $11.8 billion).” [2]

This spending represents an increase of $48 billion over fiscal year 2002.

“The U.S. increase of $48 billion is larger than that the annual military budget of any other country in the world,” said John Isaacs, president of Council for a Livable World.

If you want to know how much larger it is, consider the next big spender in the military game is the UK with a paltry US$34.8 billion (2001). Iraq by the way spent US$1.4 billion (last year declared 1999) and North Korea US$1.3 billion (2000)[3]

Martin Luther King, where are you now? When MLK’s Day was introduced it was the first new holiday since 1948, when Memorial Day was created as a “prayer for peace” day. Not only that, but it was only the third such holiday in the 20th century (the other is Veterans Day, created as Armistice Day in 1926 to honor those who died in World War I).[4]

Do you notice something? The two special holidays were created to honour Peace at the end of war, and the third a true Man of Peace who opposed war. Interesting progression. Funny how words and actions rarely meet on the same page. But they’re fighting for peace, they say. Well, are they?

The only other American to be honoured with a national holiday is George Washington. Do you get the picture? There are other holidays celebrated in different states for other leaders, but not nationwide. One would think then that a man like Martin Luther King stood for everything noble and to which America would hold her head high.

But Martin Luther King’s methods are not America’s methods.

Joseph Lowery, a contemporary of King and his counterpart as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta said. “Even those very much opposed to him during his lifetime have come to see that segregation, injustice and militarism are concerns which must be addressed by modern society.”

Segregation, injustice and militarism. Strange bedfellows.

It was President Reagan who signed legislation creating the holiday in November 1983, but this had only come about after serious lobbying for the previous 15 years. Martin Luther King is revered around the world as a man who achieved greatness through his simple practice of his Christian belief which found expression in non-violent resistant to oppression.

Today, the U.S. President, and the British and Australian Prime Ministers argue against the evil of this man Saddam Hussein as they pursue him for his weapons of mass destruction. It has nothing to do with oil, we are told. The man is clearly dangerous. No doubt he is, and so we’re ready to destroy his country and kill, maim and destroy as many of his people as we can, to get him. We might even get some fighting men as part of the deal.

Harlan Ullman does not have a holiday named after him, yet, but then he is of a slightly different breed to Martin Luther King. He is what is called a “defense intellectual.” He was the Navy’s “head of extended planning” and taught at the National War College. One of his students was Secretary of State Colin Powell, who says he “raised my vision several levels.”[5]

Be assured, Harlan’s vision will raze many things several levels. Ullman’s great vision is for high-tech war. “Rapid dominance,” he calls it, or that delightful expression “shock and awe.” The idea is to scare the enemy to death. To win, you don’t need to inflict physical pain and destruction. Just the fear of pain, and the massive confusion it creates, is enough.

“When it comes to Iraq, Ullman likes the idea of cruise missiles — lots of them, right away. CBS News reports that Ullman’s ideas are the basis for the Pentagon’s war plan. The U.S. will smash Baghdad with up to 800 cruise missiles in the first two days of the war. That’s about one every four minutes, day and night, for 48 hours.

If you’re heading for Iraq, take earplugs.

The missiles will hit far more than just military targets. They will destroy everything that makes life in Baghdad livable. “We want them to quit. We want them not to fight,” Ullman told CBS reporter David Martin. So “you take the city down. You get rid of their power, water. In 2,3,4,5 days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted.”[6]

Note he says that they will be physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted. Yeah, and that’s just the ones who remain alive.

Fortunately, the terrorists are to blame for all of this. It is not America, or the UK or Australia starting this horrible war. It’s not even the UN – (they are, after all, being rather tardy in producing the evidence George Bush craves aren’t they?) If it wasn’t for Saddam Hussein, and that other fellow Osam bin whatever-his-name was we wouldn’t need “Shock and Awe” tactics at all.

In that church, Martin Luther King’s voice was heard to say: “We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.”

George Bush invokes the God of Heaven as he makes his plans but somehow I can’t hear or see Love as the Ultimate Force propelling him.

So what’s the alternative to war with Iraq and the need to get rid of the terrible dictator. Well firstly let’s be real about what we’re saying. If our aims are to get rid of Saddam then let’s be sure we are not hypocrites about this and apply the same methods to every other evil leader in the world. There’s no shortage. North Korea has to be high on the list, Sudan, Zimbabwe – start writing out your own list and you’ll see we’re in for the long haul.

The alternative, if the reasons for war are genuine and nothing to do with oil (which none of us believe anyway now do we!) is to adopt the policies and principles of Martin Luther King. It will take more courage than any other a politician can ever do because it means going in without arms.

Can it work? You bet it can. There’s an example from recent history in Romania which started the fall of Communism throughout eastern Europe. Look it up. It relates to a Calvinist pastor Laszlo Tokes and his passive resistance of the reign of terror of Ceausescu. [7] Yes, many people lost their lives but they didn’t fight back and the regime knew they’d lost the war. Within two weeks the people themselves had executed Ceausescu and his wife.

A politician who held to this line would be a man or woman of incredible courage because they would have to stand up to the forces that want America to be seen as the great victor. The spoils of war will provide access to oil and riches of Iraq and renewed power in the middle east. It will probably also bring increased hatred and resentment from millions of people in the region. Perhaps it will birth new terrorists.

God Bless America. God Bless us all.

In that New York church Martin Luther King’s voice was being raised against the war in Vietnam. There were many lessons for us from that time but it seems we have learnt nothing. Australia cried “all the way with LBJ” (President Lyndon Baines Johnson) but it was only a few short years later we discovered how horribly wrong that war was and what terrible suffering it inflicted on a hurting people. The hurting people were poor, abused and in great need. Some of the hurting people were our own who came back home to no voice of thanks from their own nation, which by then was so ashamed that it had fought in the first place that it wanted them just to go away quietly.

By contrast “the shock and awe” war will finish quickly. Or will it? Everything that moves can be taken out, but what is in hiding will go deeper down. A friend of mine talks about counseling others with grief, pain and anger. She says that when you bury something from the past, make sure that it’s buried dead or when it comes up again it will be pretty horrible.” She talks about human emotions in this way. Problems that occur when we don’t truly forgive.

If this war has anything to do with terrorism we can be sure of one thing, it won’t take out terrorists. Real terrorists will have gone to ground well, not in Baghdad but with US, UK, or Australian visas, anywhere else in the world. They do, after all, have friends and those friends will be watching events closely.

Well that’s the real enemy isn’t it but what about the people who will be liberated by these actions? If they live, they will lose friends and family and homes and streetscapes, water, power, gas. I wonder. How much love and gratitude will an all but destroyed Iraqi people feel for their liberators? How much respect will the efforts of these “Christian” nations engender throughout a world where hides secret support for religious extremists? Will there never be another terrorist attack on New York and Washington and Bali? We hope so, but I doubt the tactics of “shock and awe” will win anything but a victory without heart. Burying the past alive.

An eye for an eye. All it creates is blindness to the pain of others.

“They must see Americans as strange liberators.” King said of America’s “Vietnam”

“They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one “Vietcong”-inflicted injury.”

(And this, without “shock and awe”)

“So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers…”

“Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak.. “

And somehow I wish that George W. Bush and his friends could be seated in that church when Martin Luther King said the words: “Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence?”

Political myth? New violence? The old old story?

“Somehow this madness must cease.” Said Martin Luther King.

A prophetic cry from the grave.

I think I’ll head to the video store and hire “Dr Strangelove”. It’s an old movie and it would be very funny if it wasn’t quite so real.

David S Ayliffe

Melbourne Australia

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[1] Quoted from a speech was delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City. For the full text of the speech visit http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/7112

[2] http://www.accuracy.org/2003/ Commentary on Bush’s State of the Union address 2003

[3] Council for a Liveable World http://www.clw.org/

[4] http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/mlk/holiday/mlkday.html “Making the Calendar”

By Paul Andrews, Seattle Times staff reporter

[5] http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0127-08.htm See the full transcipt “Shock & Awe: Is Baghdad the Next Hiroshima?” by Ira Chernus

[6] See the full transcript on http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0127-08.htm

[7] http://www.enzia.com/Pages/Rev3.html a website which documents these events

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