War and Dr. King
Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
January 12, 2003

	For the second time in as many years, I am scheduled to be out of the pulpit on the Sunday just before Martin Luther King’s Birthday, but the man and the issues he represents are so important that I’m going to speak on it a week early.  This might give you some more time to reflect.  I am assured that next week’s speaker won’t be focusing on Dr. King.
	Here’s what Dr. King said about violence.  "The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.... Returning violence for violence multiples violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. " 
	Now that is a religious statement, but it is also a political one.  Dr. King rode the dividing line between religious and political leadership with mastery.  I bring this point up, because I know that some of you are leery of coming to church on Sunday morning and hearing the minister talk about current issues in the news.  There was a letter to the UU World this month from a couple leaving a UU church in Western Massachusetts because they found “the steady diet of politics or social justice was not soul-nourishing for us.”
	A steady diet of anything is not nourishing, but this letter reminds us that in order to feed us our religion must speak to the personal and private burdens that we bear as well as the public and global.  Some of you this morning come with heavy thorns in your hearts, and I hope that you may find some comfort in this service and I encourage you to seek out the minister or the small group program or anyone else who might be able to help you realize you are not alone in this world.
	Dr. King struggled with these issues himself.  He was a parish minister in Montgomery, AL at the time of the bus boycott, and was more or less drafted into being a spokesman for that action in the mid-50's.  He went on from there to become the most prominent spokesman for civil rights by the mid-60's.  As the US Commitment in Vietnam grew, he became increasingly bothered
by it.  But strong voices within his own movement counseled him against direct involvement in the peace movement, fearing that it would dilute the energy of the civil rights movement.  It was a classic dilemma.  He was making visible progress in civil rights, but a wrong at least as large as racism was looming in the public arena and how could he keep silent about it.  He had an ally in the White House on race issues; Lyndon Johnson was more publicly committed to advancing the cause of African Americans than any president before or since in US history.  Yet Johnson was notoriously defensive and paranoid about Vietnam; he had a long memory, and he knew who his friends were and who his enemies were.  If King went over to the peace movement, would that cut off the President’s support on civil rights?
	King hesitated for two years during the buildup.  Finally, he began to make critical noises.  By April 1967, he had committed openly to the peace movement, for on April 7, he spoke to a meeting of Clergy and Laity concerned abut Vietnam, gathered in Riverside church in New York City.  I have read you some of what he said about the war.  Here’s some of what he said about the decision to speak about the war:
“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. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.”
	It is in that spirit that I want to consider today what Martin Luther King, Jr. would have said about the military action which the Bush administration seems determined to wage in Iraq.  I will assume that there are people of good faith who hear these words who will support such military action.  To you I will say that I hold my views in all humility and will gladly engage with anyone who wants to point me to error in my analysis.  
	Perhaps it is overreaching on my part to claim Dr. King as a probable opponent of the incursion into Iraq were he alive today. Certainly we can never know where he would be.  But we do know that more and more clergy and those concerned with justice and equity on the world stage are expressing opposition to the war before it starts.  John Beuhrens, minister in Needham and former UUA president, just returned from a trip to Iraq with a clergy group and they issued a statement calling on the US government not to invade. But this is a roundabout argument.  More direct evidence of Dr. King’s views are his words in the speech from which I’ve already quoted, “Beyond Vietnam.”
	Dr. King called for 
“A true revolution of values [which would] lay [its] hand 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 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.”
	“Cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.”  It seems to me that an invasion of Iraq in the present circumstances cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice or love.
	It is unwise to invade Iraq because the likely harm from the invasion outweighs the harm from not invading.   Even if Saddam actually has operational weapons of mass destruction, he is more likely to want to use them if he is cornered.  America has clear military superiority, and would likely make short work of Iraqi defenses.  But therein, ironically, lies the problem.  As the American forces are losing in on Saddam, he loses all incentive to stall and negotiate, and gains every incentive to use whatever weapons he has at his disposal.
	Even if Saddam may be defeated without his unleashing mass destruction, there will be massive instability both within Iraq and in the region.  Many heretofore friendly Islamic regimes will turn against us, trying desperately to maintain power in the face of fundamentalist forces in their own countries.  The perception of the ordinary Muslim that the U.S. threatens their religion will be strengthened.
	Besides being unwise, the war in Iraq will also be unjust.  As Howard Zinn said on Bill Moyers’ show Friday night, we can expect a great number of Iraqi casualties, however smart our bombs.  Whether it’s a few thousand, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands is simply a question of magnitude, but the central point is that the people we will kill are the principal victims of Saddam Hussain.  They are the ones who have been suffering under his dictatorship for decades now, and they will be the principal casualties in this war.
	To me, however, the strongest argument from the point of view of justice is simply that the case has not been made for a preemptive war.   Neither international nor local law condemns all violence.  There are occasions in which persons and states can resort to force.  But they are narrowly limited.  The United Nations charter in general does not allow a state to invade another unless the other state is threatening to do harm to it.  This is simply an extension of the law of self-defense.  In all jurisdictions descended from English common law, the law of self-defense has about the same requirements, and every criminal defense lawyer knows them by heart.  To claim the right of self-defense, the person claiming it must satisfy four requirements: (1) the person must reasonably believe that another person or persons is using or just about to use harmful force against him or her; (2) the person must only use that degree of force in self-defense as appears reasonably necessary to repel the attack; (3) the person must be without fault in bringing on the difficulty; and (4) unless the person is at home, he or she must use any avenue of escape, if one is reasonably available, rather than strike the blow in self-defense.
	There is another plea common in he criminal courts to excuse violence, called defense of another.  You are entitled to use force to defend someone else, but the rules are basically the same: you must think that someone is threatening harm against another person, use only so much force as is necessary to prevent the attack etc.
	It’ clear that if the United States and Iraq were two individuals say on the streets of Wakefield, the law would not allow America to strike first.  Saddam has not threatened to use any weapons against us or anyone else; in fact he denies having any.  If we think he’s lying about having the weapons, we would have to be able to show that, and that he had the intent to use them.   And in the law of self-defense, not just to use them sometime, but to use them in the imminent future.
	The we would have to show that there was not reasonable means short of an invasion and military defeat of Iraq which would avert he use of these weapons, and that the casualties inflicted on all sides by such an invasion would be less than the expected casualties from use of Saddam’s supposed weapons.  Third we would have to show that America was without fault in bringing on the difficulty, after we had supported Saddam in the eighties because he was fighting Iran.  Finally, we would have to show that we had no reasonable means of escape, which is ludicrous, since he doesn’t seem to have a delivery system capable of reaching the US except for smuggling in biological weapons through undercover agents, a technique which would not be averted by the military conquest of Iraq.
	It is also incompatible with justice that the asserted justification for the invasion, Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, has just been shown to be hollow by the irruption at the other end of Mr. Bush’s asserted Axis of evil.  If Saddam’s rumored but never proven weapons of mass destruction justify military buildup and invasion, why does North Korea’s admitted possession of plutonium and its abrogation of treaties merit only stern talk and negotiations?  Is the difference found in the fact that Iraq has oil and North Korea doesn’t?  Or that Iraq is a Muslim nation and North Korea isn’t?  Or is it that our President believes, with Mr. Emerson, that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds?
	The invasion of Iraq cannot, in Dr. King’s words, be reconciled with wisdom and justice, and it particularly cannot be reconciled with love.  The love of which Jesus spoke, and the love affirmed on our principles and purposes, is not just the love of our friends, it is not just the love of our family, it is not just the love of the people in our town or in our church.  It is love for people we have never met, will never meet.  It is love for people of completely different values and different ideas about how to live their lives.  It is love for people who pray to different gods.  
	But it is even more than that. It is love for people who have sworn enmity to us.   It is love for people who threaten our peace.  It is love for people who wish the United States would go away, who wish Israel didn’t exist.
	I have endorsed the use of force against terrorist groups who have committed atrocities.  That falls within self-defense.  We hate all violence, but there are occasions in which the use of measured and limited violence under law prevents greater harm. But the Bush administration’s attempt to equate the Iraqis with Al Quaeda have been singularly unconvincing, and they have been dropped in the last few months.  However, they seem to rely on the political calculation that the revulsion and outrage towards the attacks of September 11 will somehow be transferred to support for an adventure in Iraq.  I believe they are miscalculating.
	Let me read again what Dr. King said about love:
“This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond
one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I'm not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another (Yes), for love is God. (Yes) And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us." Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.”
	If Dr. King were alive, I think he would be making the point that if the United States of America put a fraction of the money it will cost to make war on Iraq into fighting AIDS in Africa and Asia, we could save 20 or 30 million lives instead of destroying thousands.  That’s love, folks.  
	Can we imagine an American foreign policy whose face is a doctor instead of a soldier, an agricultural specialist instead of a capitalist?  Can we imagine an America which would reclaim its history as expressing the highest hopes of humanity for freedom and justice?  Can we imagine once again being a beacon for the rest of the world?
	It’s hard to imagine it.  It feels like the forces ranged against us are too powerful, too entrenched, too well-heeled.  But that’s how the forces looked ranged against the peace activists in April of 1967, too.  Those people gathered in Riverside Church that evening could not have known that they would eventually succeed in getting the US out of Vietnam, though it took seven years to do it.  But the people in the room must have taken courage from these words of Dr. King, which seem very applicable to us today:
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message-of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.
Amen.