"Not only that, it has put us in a position of appearing to the world as an arrogant nation. And here we are 10,000 miles away from home, fighting for the so-called freedom of the (native) people, when we have not even put our own house in order. The judgment of God is upon us today. And we could go right down the line and see that something must be done -- and something must be done quickly. We have alienated ourselves from other nations so we end up morally and politically isolated in the world. There is not a single major ally of the United States of America that would dare send a troop to --
"Vietnam."
That was a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. Four days later, he was slaughtered in Memphis.
Dr. King did not live to see the day, five years later, when the United States pulled out from Vietnam the last of our flags. That was in 1973. And he did not live to see the day, two years later, when Saigon fell and the communist victors killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and forced more than 1.5 million into re-education camps, causing 2 million others to flee Vietnam.
Lawrence Kaplan is a senior editor of The New Republic. He wrote last week: "U.S. troops are the only thing standing between what we see on our television sets today and butchery on a scale that would rival the worst of Saddam Hussein's depredations." Good men will perhaps not be finally governed by consideration of the moral question in Iraq, but they will not conceal that the point is there for men of good will to weigh.
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