Juan Cole: MLK and peace

Yesterday, Juan Cole analyzed Martin Luther King's profound views on peace and their relevance to our current situation.  Cole supports King's view that ultimately "destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends."  He quotes this from the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize:
 

More recently I have come to see the need for the method of nonviolence in international relations.
   Although I was not yet convinced of its efficacy in conflicts between nations, I felt that while war could never be a positive good, it could serve as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force. War, horrible as it is, might be preferable to surrender to a totalitarian system.
   But now I believe that the potential destructiveness of modern weapons totally rules out the possibility of war ever again achieving a negative good.
   If we assume that mankind has a right to survive then we must find an alternative to war and destruction.

Pilgrimage to Nonviolence in Strength to Love, 1958

Cole uses the examples of Vietnam, Nicaragua and Reagan's war in Afghanistan to support King's view.  He says none of these wars should have been fought: "Either we lost, or the victory was temporary, or we contributed to a blowback that hit our society on 9/11."  Cole also says that "the destructiveness" of the US war in Iraq provoked the Iraqi insurgencies.  He continues:  

War does not work. It is too destructive. It creates too much blowback, as with Afghanistan and al-Qaeda. It leaves too much of the city destroyed, that it meant to save, as with Falluja. It cannot midwife rights or democracy, it is too gross, too indiscriminate, too brutal for that purpose. It produces Abu Ghraib and Falluja, not Monticello.

A Middle East expert, Professor Cole says it is time for the US to end its military presence in Iraq.

It is not a Japan or a Germany after WW II, both of which feared the Soviet Union and so could put up with foreign bases as protection. Iraqis fear no one, such that they would accept permanent bases. The Middle East is a postcolonial region inhospitable to the humiliations of foreign domination, which its peoples struggled hard and long to end.

Some have called Bush's war in Iraq a colossal strategic blunder;  Cole calls Reagan's war in Afghanistan a historical blunder. This is one of the most interesting parts of his article, since people usually praise the Afghan success in driving out the Soviets:

Had the communists stayed in power in Afghanistan, their regime would probably have just evolved after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 into a Kazakhstan-style state. Not a democracy, but stable enough and with schooling for all and an investment in development.  Instead, Reagan and his Saudi and Pakistani allies funneled the lion's share of their covert war aid to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the most radical of the Mujahidin leaders. They forced the Soviet Union out, and destroyed the Afghanistan communists, but the ultimate result was a) the rise of al-Qaeda and b) the rise of the Taliban.

Finally, Cole discusses the security challenges facing the United States.

There is the rivalry with other nuclear powers, where war cannot be used as a tool of diplomacy because it would be far too destructive.
    There is conflict between the US and small weak third world annoyances such as Iran. What the Iraq War should have taught us is that elective war is a horrible policy tool for dealing with such conflicts.
    And there is the problem of terrorism, which cannot be fought with big conventional militaries. The attempt to do so just provokes insurgencies that grow potentially even more formidable.

Cole sees Bush and Cheney as imagining it is 1942 or 1947. "Their mindset is that of the first half of the twentieth century. They are men of the past."