Last month, military forces led by the United States reportedly killed as many as 200 civilians during an airstrike on the Iraqi city of Mosul. That harrowing number of dead may well be one of the single largest civilian casualties at the hands of U.S. military since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, if not since Vietnam.

The Vietnam War is on our minds today of all days - the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his famous anti-war speech at Riverside Church in New York City. A year later he would be assassinated on this date.

In that speech, which came to be known as "Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence," King not only called for an end to the Vietnam War, but for a transformation of national priorities.

"We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values," King said before the "Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam" group. "We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

He spoke from the first-person perspective of witnessing anti-poverty and civil-rights programs defunded for a budget focused on war.

"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."

Half a century has passed, and little has changed. Our military spends more money than ever, often without check or oversight. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is, according to the Project On Government Oversight, a $1.4 trillion failure that cannot meet its basic mission goals for the Air Force, Navy or Marines.

How many senior citizens in Beaumont go without necessary healthcare? How many school kids in Pasadena go without adequate education? How many drug addicts in Galveston go without treatment? And we've budgeted $1.4 trillion for a plane that doesn't work.

Meanwhile, after 15 years in Iraq with little end in sight, the White House is expanding our military footprint into Syria and Yemen. Like Vietnam, we have to wonder what, exactly, we're fighting for and what our nation is sacrificing to gain it.

As King said a half-century ago, these individual wars are "but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit."

At what point do people start to wonder if something is wrong with a system that starves the poor to feed the dogs of war?