Between Hope and Despair: Martin Luther King, Barack Obama and War

The Washington DC memorial to Martin Luther King, located on the Tidal Basin between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, was supposed to be completed by now. President Clinton authorized the memorial in 1996; President Bush appeared at a groundbreaking ceremony in 2006, as did Senator Barack Obama. But the memorial, designed with a massive statue of King and two huge rocks representing the Mountain of Despair and the Stone of Hope, was left hovering in legal and bureaucratic limbo for a dozen years.

In the meantime, Senator Obama became President Obama. And in the course of one year, those who thought President Obama would move our nation closer towards Dr. King's vision find themselves tottering, like King's memorial, between hope and despair.

Obama certainly gave the world hope when he spoke of the importance of diplomacy, global cooperation, re-engaging with the Muslim world and respecting international law.

But his actions speak another language. He promised to end torture and close Guantanamo but extraordinary renditions continue, Guantanamo is still open, and the Bagram prison in Afghanistan is still filled with over 600 prisoners who have been held indefinitely -- some for six years -- with no charges and no trials.

Obama promised to reignite the peace process in the Middle East, and tried to get a commitment from the Israeli government to freeze settlements. But he backed off then Israel refused the freeze. Moreover, Obama authorized $30 billion to Israel with no strings attached, dismissed the Goldstone report that called for an investigation into Israeli war crimes during the invasion of Gaza, and refuses to even talk to the democratically elected government in Gaza: Hamas.

In Iraq, Obama won support from a majority of Americans by setting a timeline for withdrawing U.S. combat troops by August 31, 2010 and pulling all troops out by the end of 2011. But Defense Secretary Robert Gates, during a visit to Iraq in December 2009, said Air Force advisers will probably stay in Iraq after the end of 2011. And nobody is promising to pull out private contractors.

But it is the escalation of the war in Afghanistan -- and beyond to Pakistan -- that is the greatest cause for despair as it reveals an administration stuck in the mindset of militarism.

Martin Luther King, dealing with the military mindset of his time, called for a revolution of values. In his powerful April 4, 1967 speech outlining his opposition to the war in Vietnam, King put forward his vision: "A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: This way of settling differences is not just. 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 veins of people 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."

Obama would do well to examine the reasons that King turned his moral compass to opposing the Vietnam war, as the parallels with Afghanistan are striking:

• * King saw President Johnson's Poverty Program as a moment of real promise for the poor, both black and white. "Then came the build-up in Vietnam, and I watched the program broken as if it was 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."  Obama's domestic programs -- from heath care to jobs to green initiatives -- all require hundreds of billions of dollars. By 2009, Congress had approved over $1 trillion dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the administration will soon ask for another $33 billion to pay for the surge. This continued emphasis on war and a bloated Pentagon budget is making it impossible for Obama to fund critical domestic programs in a time of financial crisis.
• King was concerned about the death of U.S. soldiers, and the disproportionate number of soldiers from poor communities. He also pointed out that young black men were being sent thousands of miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia that they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. Today, with a volunteer army instead of a draft, the poor still disproportionately enlist and fight, and military recruiters do their most aggressive recruiting in neighborhoods that fall below the median income.
• King also felt a calling to oppose the war because of the suffering it brought to the people of Vietnam. He expressed compassion for the Vietnamese who, like Afghans, had been under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades. "It is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution until some attempt is made to know these people and hear their broken cries," he said.