Today would have been the 87th birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a date that, since 1986, has been celebrated as a holiday in his memory here in the US.
Dr. King was a powerful orator. When I hear recordings of his great speeches and sermons I get goose-bumps, or sometimes even cry.
Special reason to cry, today more than ever before, when listening to his historic and powerful 1997 address known variously as “Beyond Vietnam– A time to break the silence” or “Why I oppose the war in Vietnam.”
That link includes both the full text and an audio version of the speech.
I wrote about this speech here on MLK Day two years ago. Today, I just want to focus on the five-point policy plan that Dr. King presented there:
- I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:
Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.
Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.
Part of our ongoing…part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country, if necessary. Meanwhile… meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.
The internal politics of the “target country” (a.k.a., in COIN-speak, “host nation”) in the case of today’s nightmarish conflict is a little different than it was in the case of Vietnam. (Though not as completely different as those commentators and spinmeisters would have you believe, who describe the only political forces at play inside as being “Shiites” or “Sunnis” or “Kurds”, without recognizing the Iraqi-nationalist sentiment that is still found throughout– in particular– the ethnic-Arab parts of the country…)
But still, nearly all those points that Dr. King recommended back in 1967 are directy applicable today, and they could be re-expressed in the following list of demands on the US government:
- (1) An end to all escalatory U.S. military operations in and around Iraq,
(2) The U.S. should also announce a unilateral ceasefire to help create the atmosphere for negotiation,
(3) The U.S. should curtail– or better yet, reverse– its military buildup in the broader region around Iraq, in order to prevent the eruption of additional battlegrounds there,
(4) Washington should recognize that the vast majority of the Iraqi people want to see US troops leave their country as fast as possible, and should invite the UN to broker US-Iraqi and US-Iraqi-regional negotiations that will allow this to happen in as orderly as possible a way,
(5) President Bush should announce a firm date, some 4-6 months hence, by which he intends to have all US troops out of Iraq, this being the biggest contribution the US can make to ending the bloodshed there and a way to help galvanize the negotiations described in #4,
(6) The US withdrawal from Iraq should also be generous to the Iraqi people– both those who might choose to flee their country with the departing US forces and the far, far greater number who will remain or return there to rebuild it under their own independent government.
That last point, #6, is additional to the five points corresponding to Dr. King’s five points. But it corresponds generally to what Dr. King said at the top of that next paragraph. Regarding Vietnam, we can recall that for many years after the US’s final withdrawal in 1975, successive governments in Washington continued to try to punish the Vietnamese in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi through economic sanctions. We should absolutely reject that approach, and urge reparations for Iraq– as Dr. King had done, for Vietnam.
Dr. King was assassinated exactly one year after he delivered that landmark speech.
Now, we once again find ourselves entangled in a similarly lethal foreign military entanglement. Once again, we have to respond to Dr. King’s clarion call:
Two last points. United for Peace and Justice is organizing a big antiwarMarch on Washington Jan. 27th. I’m planning to be there. Are you? Also, check out the video they posted on YouTube, with some powerful clips from Dr. King talking about the inhumanities of war.