Pentagon Official: King Would Support Iraq, Afghan Wars (VIDEO)
WASHINGTON -- Although the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. is best remembered by the American public for fighting against racial discrimination, he was also an outspoken opponent of war and violence, most notably of the war in Vietnam. A top Obama administration official at the Department of Defense, however, argued Thursday that if King were alive, he would understand and perhaps even support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At a Pentagon commemoration of King's accomplishments, DOD General Counsel Jeh Johnson suggested that today's wars are in line with the reverend's teachings.
"I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack," Johnson said. "Every day, our servicemen and women practice the dangerousness -- the dangerous unselfishness Dr. King preached on April 3, 1968."
In April 1967, King spoke out forcefully against the Vietnam War in a landmark speech at Riverside Church in New York City, criticizing the large amounts of money the United States was spending on fighting rather than taking care of its citizens domestically:
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the young black men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor. [...]This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Salon's Justin Elliott wrote that while it's impossible to know what King would think of today's wars, this speech "strongly suggests that he would be an opponent of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, for that matter, the secret wars in Yemen and Pakistan."
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First Posted: 01/14/11 11:46 AM Updated: 01/14/11 07:09 PM