@osborneInk posted Friday about a Defense Dept General Jeh Johnson invoking MLK as a willing accomplice to a defense oriented worldview.  Of course!  Why not? 

Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson has raised another kerfuffle on the left with this:

“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

Osborne Ink » Blog Archive » Martin Luther King And The “Good” War#more-8170#more-8170#more-8170#more-8170

Osborne goes on to say : “Nonviolence is not the same as pacifism; King understood this perfectly well. “

As much as I enjoy Osborne’s posts and tweets, this raises my defenses.  Just where are we taking MLK here?  We are aware,  are we not ,  that MLK was “Gandhian”, right?  That he eschewed violence.  So what part of pacifism is being questioned? 

I am not so sure that King would not be saying what Stanley Hauerwas said:

What a gift Bush gave Osama bin Laden. Prior to the President’s declaration of war, bin Laden had been a murderer. But Bush’s response made bin Laden what he so desperately wanted to be “a warrior”. And by declaring war against terrorism, Bush was able to fight an undeclared war against Afghanistan. Now his Administration is trying to justify an impending war against Iraq as a continuation of the war against terrorism.

(from http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2003/02/hauerwas0203.html)