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He had a dream -- but Iraq, drones would have been his nightmare

It's a shame that Martin Luther King Day has been more or less hijacked by the Obama inauguration this year. In fact, I wonder if he'd be at the swearing-in, or somewhere else in the caputal, protesting drone warfare. Listen again to what Dr. King said in 1967 about Vietnam, and mourn how much of it could be said about our conduct in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere:

All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy -- and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us -- not their fellow Vietnamese --the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go -- primarily women and children and the aged.

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform?

As noted before, Obama gets four more years to get it right. As Dr. King taught us, we can all dream, right?