King’s message was to the American people as we “bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.” The American people have shown they want to end the Iraq War, but the president is not listening and the Congress is acting slowly. King gave his speech in 1967. People in government knew the war was not winnable in 1965. Yet it was not until a decade later that it finally ended. Tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese lost their lives after we knew the wrong was war. Let us know allow our government to make that mistake again. We cannot allow a slow end to the Iraq War. It will be too costly in the loss of lives, dollars and prestige. We must end it now and insist that the Congress use all of its power to do so.
In the U.S. today we are seeing another reality that Dr. King saw, the funding of much needed programs at home to alleviate poverty, provide health care, housing, education and even to renew the basic infrastructure of the United States. Further, we fail to deal with the need to reduce dramatically carbon fuels and their impact on the environment. None of this will be dealt with due to the massive investment in Iraq. The same was true in Vietnam, as Dr. King noted in explaining why a civil rights leader is speaking out against war: “America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”
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