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	Globalizing Martin Luther King"s legacy by Taylor Branch The New York Times USA   Jan. 17, 2006   The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr."s name carries more resonance than impact - noble, universal, yet bounded by race and time.   The official celebration of his birthday draws tributes to the end of legal segregation, reprises of landmark oratory and varied appraisals of problems for minorities. Yet despite America"s high-stakes national commitment to advance free government around the world, Americans consistently marginalize or ignore King"s commitment to the core values of democracy.   His own words present a vast and urgent landscape for freedom. "No American is without responsibility," King declared only hours after the 1965 "Bloody Sunday" repulse of voting rights marchers in Selma, Alabama.   "All are involved in the sorrow that rises from Selma to contaminate every crevice of our national life," he added. "The struggle in Selma is for the survival of democracy everywhere in our land."   His public appeal gathered an overnight host from many states behind a blockaded vigil. When white supremacists beat one volunteer to death with impunity, King responded with prophetic witness against the grain of violence. "Out of the wombs of a frail world," he assured mourners, "new systems of equality and justice are being born."   Selma released waves of political energy from the human nucleus of freedom. Ordinary citizens ventured across cultural barriers, aroused a transnational conscience and engaged all three branches of government.   After the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, King claimed that the distinctive methods of sharecroppers and students had revived nothing less than the visionary heritage of the American Revolution.   "The stirring lesson of this age is that mass nonviolent direct action is not a peculiar device for Negro agitation," he told the Synagogue Council of America. "Rather it is a historically validated method for defending freedom and democracy, and for enlarging these values for the benefit of the whole society."   This effusive axiom went unnoticed, but the blessings of freedom did ripple far beyond the black victims of caste. As King predicted, the civil rights movement liberated segregationists themselves.   The integrity of law enforcement rose with a stark decline in racial terror. The Atlanta Braves joined the first professional sports teams to spring up at integrated stadiums, and business radiated Sun Belt growth into a region of historic poverty.   In elections, new black voters generated the 20th century"s first two-party competition to displace the ossified regimes of white supremacy. The stigma of segregation no longer curtailed a Southerner"s chances for high national office, and fresh candidates rose swiftly to leadership in both national parties. Parallel tides opened doors for the first female students at some universities and most private colleges, then the military academies.   Overseas, as an amalgam of forces suddenly dissolved the Soviet empire atop its mountain of nuclear weapons, King"s message echoed in the strains of "We Shall Overcome" heard along the Berlin Wall and the streets of Prague. Likewise, South African apartheid melted without the long-dreaded racial Armageddon, on miraculous healing words from a former prisoner, Nelson Mandela.   Students shocked the world from Tiananmen Square with nonviolent demonstrations modeled on American sit-ins, planting seeds of democracy within the authoritarian shell of Chinese Communism.   These and other sweeping trends from the civil rights era have transformed daily life in many countries, and now their benefit is scarcely contested. Yet the political discourse behind them is atrophied. Public service has fallen into sad disrepute. Spitballs pass for debate. Comedians write the best-selling books on civics. King"s ideas are not so much rebutted as cordoned off or begrudged, and for two generations his voice of anguished hope has given way to a dominant slogan that government itself is bad.   Above all, no one speaks for nonviolence. Indeed, the most powerful discipline from the freedom movement was the first to be ridiculed across the political spectrum. "A hundred political commentators have interred nonviolence into a premature grave," King complained after Selma. The concept seemed alien and unmanly. It came to embarrass many civil rights veterans, even though nonviolence lies at the heart of democracy.   Every ballot - the most basic element of free government - is by definition a piece of nonviolence, symbolizing hard-won or hopeful consent to raise politics above anarchy and war.   The boldest principles of democratic character undergird the civil rights movement"s nonviolent training. James Madison, arguing to ratify the Constitution in 1788, summoned "every votary of freedom to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government," and he added that no form of government can secure liberty "without virtue in the people."   By steeling themselves to endure blows without retaliation, and remaining steadfastly open to civil contact with their oppressors, civil rights demonstrators offered shining examples of the revolutionary balance that launched the American system: self-government and public trust. All the rest is careful adjustment.   Like Madison, the marchers from Selma turned rulers and subjects into fellow citizens. A largely invisible people offered leadership in the role of modern founders. For an incandescent decade, from 1955 to 1965, the heirs of slavery lifted the whole world toward freedom.   Weariness and war intruded. In the White House, President Lyndon Johnson wrestled the political subtleties of sending soldiers to guarantee liberty at home. "Troops leave a bitter taste in the mouths of all the people," cautioned Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. The president moaned simultaneously over predictions of bloody stalemate if he sent troops to Vietnam, saying the prospect "makes the chills run up my back," but he succumbed to schoolyard politics. The American people, he feared, "will forgive you for everything except being weak."   Lamenting religious leaders who accommodated the war, King defended nonviolence on two fronts. "Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them?" he asked. "What then can I say to the Vietcong, or to Castro, or to Mao? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?"   In politics, King endorsed a strategic alternative to violence. "We will stop communism by letting the world know that democracy is a better government than any other government," he told his congregation, "and by making justice a reality for all of God"s children."   Pressures intensified within King"s own movement. To battered young colleagues who wondered why nonviolence was consigned mostly to black people, while others admired James Bond, he could only commend the burden as a redemptive sacrifice.   Change was slow, however, for a land still dotted with lynching, and frustration turned to rebellion as the war in Vietnam hardened the political climate. When offered incendiary but fleeting fame in 1966, the leaders of various black power movements repudiated nonviolence along with the vote itself, which they had given so much to win.   Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson steadily lost his presidency at home before he could forge any political order in Vietnam. Although casualty figures confirmed the heavy advantage of American arms, Johnson fell victim to a historical paradox evolving since the age of Napoleon: Modern warfare destroys more but governs less - one reason military commanders seem, in my limited experience, more skeptical than civilians about the political use of lethal force.   King grew ever more lonely in conviction about the gateway to constructive politics. "I"m committed to nonviolence absolutely," he wrote. "I"m just not going to kill anybody, whether it"s in Vietnam or here."   When discouragement invaded his own staff, he exhorted them to rise above fear and hatred alike. "We must not be intimidated by those who are laughing at nonviolence now," he told them on his last birthday.   His oratory fused the political promise of equal votes with the spiritual doctrine of equal souls. He planted one foot in American heritage, the other in scripture, and both in nonviolence.   "I say to you that our goal is freedom," he said in his last Sunday sermon. "And I believe we"re going to get there because, however much she strays from it, the goal of America is freedom."   Only hours before his death, King startled an aide with a balmy aside from his unpopular movement to uplift the poor. "In our next campaign," he remarked, "we have to institutionalize nonviolence and take it international."   The United States would do well to incorporate this goal into its mission abroad, reinforcing the place of nonviolence among the fundamentals of democracy, along with equal citizenship, self-government and accountable public trust.   America could also restore King"s role in the continuing story of freedom to its rightful prominence, emphasizing that the best way to safeguard democracy is to practice it.   (Taylor Branch is the author, most recently, of "At Canaan"s Edge," the third volume of his biography of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.)
	I weep for our errors in Iraq by Clare Short, Sir Michael Rose AFP / The Independent / The Guardian United Kingdom   March 4, 2006.   Blair believes God will judge him on Iraq war. (AFP)   British Prime Minister Tony Blair says he believes God will judge him on his decision to go to war with Iraq.   In an interview with chat show host Michael Parkinson to be broadcast on Britain''s ITV1 television, Mr Blair says he made policy decisions according to his conscience, which is guided by his Christian faith.   Asked about joining the US-led invasion in March 2003, he said: "That decision has to be taken and has to be lived with, and in the end there is a judgment that - well, I think if you have faith about these things then you realise that judgment is made by other people".   Pushed to clarify what he meant, Mr Blair, a devout Christian, replied: "If you believe in God, it''s made by God as well".   "This is not just a matter of a policy here or a thing there, but of their lives and in some case their death ... the only way you can take a decision like that is to try to do the right thing, according to your conscience and for the rest of it you leave it to the judgment that history will make," he said.   Mr Parkinson asked Mr Blair whether he prays to God when making a decision such as going to war.   "I don''t want to get into something like that," Mr Blair said. Pressed on the subject Mr Blair answered: "Of course you struggle with your own conscience about it because people''s lives are affected and it''s one of these situations that I suppose very few people ever find themselves in. In the end you do what you think is the right thing".   In October last year, US President George W Bush allegedly said God told him to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, a report said.   Mr Blair''s comments were immediately criticised by opposition political parties and families of some of the 103 British soldiers who have died since the start of the conflict.   Opposition   Menzies Campbell, leader of the smaller opposition Liberal Democrats, which opposed military action, said: "Going to war isn''t just an act of faith, it requires rigorous analysis of the legality of doing so, the likelihood of success, the number of possible casualties and the long-term consequences".   "My complaint of the Prime Minister is that while he may have believed what he was doing was right, the prospectus for military action was flawed."   His Liberal Democrat colleague Evan Harris, an honorary associate of campaign group the National Secular Society, agreed. "Our political system relies on decisions being made by accountable and elected politicians, not by their or anyone else''s gods," Mr Harris said. "It''s a bizarre and shocking revelation that the Prime Minister claims to have been guided by the supernatural in this matter, especially given the particular religious sensitivities in the Middle East.   "Politicians should avoid references to deities in their public life. We don''t want Bush or Khomeini-type fundamentalism in our politics."   Reg Keys, whose son Tom was one of six Royal Military Police officers killed by an Iraqi mob in June 2003, said God and religion had nothing to do with the conflict. "This is his (Blair''s) effort to fudge it. War should be the final option that a prime minister takes when all avenues have failed," Mr Keys said, who stood against the Prime Minister in the last general election on an anti-war ticket. "In my view those other avenues hadn''t failed. He is using God as a get-out for total strategic failure and I find it abhorrent."   February 19, 2006   I weep for our errors in Iraq, by Clare Short. (The Independent)   Not many years ago, I used to say that our troops were some of the best peacekeepers in the world. Having learned their lessons in Northern Ireland, their performance in Bosnia, East Timor, and Sierra Leone - and in leading the establishment of the peace-keeping force in Kabul - was exemplary.   The Department for International Development, of which I was Secretary of State, provided some funding, and the troops worked in ways that enabled them to get to know the local people. They helped with emergency repairs, set up football clubs, and got involved in other activities. The secret of the troops" success was that they treated local people with respect. And so - despite all the deceit on the road to war in Iraq - it was easy to believe the claims that life was better in Basra than Baghdad partly because our troops knew how to behave.   We can no longer be under that illusion. The video footage that came to light last week showing the beatings of young men by British troops - and the decision of the people of Basra to refuse all contact with British forces - suggests that all is not as we were led to believe. We can no longer feel the same pride in the performance of our armed forces. And their loss of reputation makes them more vulnerable in Iraq and Afghanistan.   On top of what we have just learnt about British military conduct, we have seen more despicable photographs of the mistreatment by the American military of prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Quite apart from anything else, they are a reminder that at no time since the scandal emerged in 2004 has there been a proper inquiry into it, and that nobody in a position of authority has been held to account.   All this in a week when a UN report called for the closure of Guantanamo Bay, and in which our courts told the Government that it should make representations on behalf of British residents held in Guantanamo Bay.   The US defence of Guantanamo is that prisoners there are war criminals who will be held for as long as the conflict lasts. But just as this argument was being promulgated, a senior British police officer told us that the war on terror was likely to last for as long as 50 years. Against this backdrop, Labour MPs voted in overwhelming numbers for a system of creeping compulsion in the introduction of ID cards and for the insidious new criminal offence of "glorifying terrorism".   I could weep for the accumulating errors that are being made, and for the violence and bloodshed that are likely to continue to spread across the world for many decades to come.   And it gets worse. The prospect of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems now more remote than ever.. The politics of the Middle East will remain poisoned, the anger of the Muslim world undiminished.   The International Crisis Group last week published a study of the insurgency in Iraq, and concluded that it was becoming better organised, less fragmented and more conscious of the need not to alienate Iraqi opinion. It is increasingly confident it can win. And educated Iraqi families who survived the Iran-Iraq war, the first Gulf War, sanctions, and the evils of the Saddam Hussein regime are leaving in droves because the present situation is unbearable. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is resurgent, and the country has become anarchic, with the likely prospect of an endless war paralleling the situation in Colombia. The decision to deploy British troops to one of the most dangerous areas of the country risks increasing loss of our soldiers" lives, in a hopeless, endless war.   British foreign policy is a major part of the problem. At a time when we desperately need international co-operation to deal with the problems of global warming, poverty, population growth and loss of environmental resources, we have growing bitter division, an undermining of the UN, and of international law. People frequently compare the errors of Iraq to the Suez adventure. I"m afraid it is much more serious than that, and on top of this we have the prospect of an attack on Iran to prevent its developing nuclear capacity.   Meanwhile, our constitutional structures are malfunctioning. Deceiving Parliament was always seen as the unforgivable crime in our constitutional arrangements. But there has been no holding of the Prime Minister to account for his deceit over Iraq, and the main opposition party is busy repairing its relationship with the Bush administration. The traditional Labour Party is in despair, with membership collapsing and the recent by-election defeat a sign of things to come. The problem is that no solution is in sight and therefore the people are increasingly contemptuous of the political establishment.   It will get worse before it gets better. There will be no peace until a future American administration understands the trouble they are in and the need for a just settlement in the Middle East. And in the UK, we will not get what we need unless we achieve a hung parliament. This could lead to a change in the electoral system to halt the concentration of unaccountable and incompetent policy-making in No 10. These are gloomy times and we need to face up to just how bad they are in order to begin to build the movements that will start to put things right.   (Clare Short was the UK Secretary of State for International Development from 1997 to 2003).   January 10, 2006   General Sir Michael Rose calls for British PM to be impeached over Iraq War. (The Guardian)   The only way Parliament can regain the trust of disaffected voters is to admit that it was wrong to support the war.   Wars are won when the people, government and army work together for a common cause in which they genuinely believe. Whereas the people may be initially uncertain about military intervention, politicians will often be the strongest advocates - blinded by the imperatives of their political views. It will invariably be military commanders who are most cautious about using force - for they understand better than most the consequences of engaging in war.   Although in a true democracy they must remain subordinate to their political masters, they have a clear responsibility to point out when political strategies are flawed or inadequately resourced. Since they might also have to ask their soldiers to sacrifice their lives, they must be assured that a war is just, legal and the last resort available. Yet three years ago this country was somehow led by the prime minister into war in Iraq where few, if any, of these requirements were met.   Most importantly a clear justification for the war in Iraq was never sufficiently made by Tony Blair - for the intelligence he presented was always embarrassingly patchy and inconsistent. What is more, his unequivocal statement to the House of Commons that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that could be used within 45 minutes was made without being properly validated - for it was decided in Washington and London to launch the invasion of Iraq early, on the basis of the flimsy evidence available. This was done without asking the UN weapons inspectors, who were actually on the ground in Iraq, to investigate this allegation. Ultimately, as the inspectors suspected and as we now all know, it turned out that there were no such weapons. Britain had been led into war on false pretences. It was a war that was to unleash untold suffering on the Iraqi people and cause grave damage to the west"s prospects in the wider war against global terror.   Nevertheless, today the prime minister seeks to persuade the world that the war was justifiable because Saddam Hussein was toppled and there now exists in Iraq a slender hope of democracy. The Iraqi elections are a creditable achievement by the coalition forces. But it must be remembered that a general election was previously held in Iraq in 1956, and within two years the country had fallen under military rule. Without adequate security and the necessary democratic institutions in place, there are absolutely no long-term guarantees that democracy will endure.   Before the invasion, regime change was never cited as a reason for going to war. Indeed, Mr Blair insisted that regime change was not, nor ever could be, a reason for going to war. Had such a justification been fully debated in parliament, it is exceedingly unlikely that the necessary political support would have been forthcoming. It was the apparent need to defend ourselves against a dire threat - so vividly described by Mr Blair in the Commons - that finally won the political argument.   During the build-up to war and since, most of the electorate of this country have consistently opposed the decision to invade. People have seen their political wishes ignored for reasons now proved false. But there has been no attempt in parliament to call Mr Blair personally to account for what has transpired to be a blunder of enormous strategic significance. It should come as no surprise therefore that so many of this country"s voters have turned their backs on a democratic system they feel has so little credibility and is so unresponsive.   One obvious way of re-engaging these disaffected voters would be for parliament to accept that it wrongly supported the war - but only because it believed what Mr Blair told them. Now it is clear that parliament was misled by Mr Blair, either wittingly or unwittingly, parliament should also call on him for a full explanation as to why he went to war. It is not a sufficient excuse for Mr Blair to say that he acted in good faith and that his decisions were based on the intelligence he had been given. For it is the clear responsibility of people in his position to test intelligence. No intelligence can ever be taken at face value. Indeed it is negligent so to do.   Parliament should therefore ascertain how far the prime minister did evaluate intelligence regarding WMD and how he assessed the reliability of the many sources that provided that intelligence. It should ask him what corroborating evidence there was for his specific statement about WMD - and why more use was not made of the UN inspectors on the ground in Iraq to test the validity of that statement. It should inquire just how much he discounted the mass of intelligence that came in from the Iraqi National Congress - a body that had a vested interest in removing Saddam from power. The list of possible questions is huge and would no doubt be usefully expanded during any hearings.   Mr Blair is an able barrister who should relish the opportunity to put his side of the case. No one can undo the decision to go to war. But the impeachment of Mr Blair is now something I believe must happen if we are to rekindle interest in the democratic process.   (General Sir Michael Rose was adjutant general of the British army and commander of the UN protection force in Bosnia).
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