The Department of Defense has bitten off a little more than they can chew here:
WASHINGTON, Jan. 13, 2011 – If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, would he understand why the United States is at war?
Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel, posed that question at today’s Pentagon commemoration of King’s legacy.
In the final year of his life, King became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, Johnson told a packed auditorium. However, he added, today's wars are not out of line with the iconic Nobel Peace Prize winner'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,” he said.
Johnson is a 1979 graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta, where King graduated in 1948. He also attended school with King's son, Martin Luther King III, and was privy to the elder King’s speaking engagements there.
The short answer is that King was committed to the principle of nonviolence and so would not have supported any war, let alone one most Americans today think is not worth fighting. In fact it seems likely that not only would King not have supported the war in Afghanistan, he would have actively campaigned against it.
This is what he said in his famous speech about the Vietnam War:
Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
So King saw a moment for robust social investment, squandered by the need to devote government resources to a lengthy military engagement halfway across the world. Communism was more of an existential threat to the United States than Islamic extremism will ever be -- it's incomprehensible that King would have looked at a near 10 percent unemployment rate, 16 percent for black Americans, and believed that the wisest government investment would be an open-ended engagement devoted to eradicating fewer than a hundred terrorists in the border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The person least likely to acquiesce to a vision of radical Islam as mere "hatred for our freedoms," would be King, who would likely see the opposite -- the spread of violent Islamism as a failure of Americans to live up to our own ideals:
It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.
One could hardly imagine a more devastating or eloquent public opponent of the war in Afghanistan than King, were he still alive. King's dream hadn't grown post-racial, but he increasingly saw the battle he was fighting as one not merely of race, but of class. In a nation where a black man could be elected president, one wonders how widely King's message of unity for the poor and working class would have resonated.
Of course, it's hard to know -- King's stature today comes in part from his martyrdom. But surely, the man who said of the North Vietnamese that "no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers," would be no more persuaded if that document were the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force.
UPDATE: David Dayen has more context on the speech.
