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Not surprisingly, Afghan President Hamid Karzai pleaded months ago "for the U.S. to halt air strikes in his country, following attacks that Afghan officials said killed 147 people, Reuters reported.
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But President Obama isn t listening to the president of Afghanistan. Neither is he listening to the swelling chorus of Americans who regard the attack on Afghanistan as "a mistake and who believe, says Gallup Poll, that by a two to one margin the U.S. is spending "too much on defense. Apparently, some Americans are painfully aware that dollars spent to conquer Afghanistan will never fund education or retraining in America.
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Of the five major civil rights organizations, the NAACP and the National Urban League, the two oldest and most conservative, backed U.S. involvement in Viet Nam. The NAACP was determined to show how patriotic African-American Americans were, even as Pentagon records in 1966 revealed a disproportionate number of Army casualties, some 23 percent, were African-Americans.
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And while privately many Urban League officials opposed the Viet Nam war, the organization was reaping Federal anti-poverty grants for its job training and job-finding work from President Johnson. This followed the Urban League s successful voter registration campaign in 1964 that enrolled an estimated 1 million new black voters. The campaign was non-partisan, of course, but well over 90 percent of Negroes signed up would vote for LBJ over Republican challenger Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona.
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Yet three courageous civil rights organizations attacked the war: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee(SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality(CORE) and, most significantly, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference(SCLC). SCLC s Rev. King, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient, called the Viet Nam war "blasphemy against all that America stands for. And was criticized for his stand by Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the Urban League.
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