Why Martin Luther King would speak against war in Afghanistan.

In 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King lashed out at the US government over the Vietnam War. His speech: "Beyond Vietnam: A time to break the silence" not just to raise parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan, which are certainly growing with President Obama's mission creep calls for military escalation. Dr. King's speech also illustrates how fighting a long war abroad grossly depletes our government's wherewithal to handle a more critical socioeconomic crisis at home. Dr. King saw the war as undermining our ability to fight the "unconditional war on poverty". "... I watched the (program for the destitute) eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that 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."