For many of us this Christmas, the hymns with a message of peace are being sung with a lump in the throat. "There is no peace on earth," as Longfellow mourned during another period of national pain.

With a new president, there was the possibility that this troubling decade would end in optimism, that we would forsake the war lust that followed 9/11. Instead, we'll continue down the same path, slipping deeper into a quagmire that will cost precious lives and resources. The lessons from Vietnam have been set aside. Afghanistan is "different."

I searched Barack Obama's Nobel acceptance speech for a reason to hope and instead found only cause for despair. The war in Afghanistan, he said, is a "Just War," morally permitted "in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks."

But in Afghanistan, we are pursuing not only Al Qaeda (most of whose fighters, plotters, and affiliates are elsewhere) but also the Taliban, which has not attacked us and isn't likely to. As in Vietnam, we're fighting in a country whose government - supported by us - is notoriously corrupt.

Experts warn that our involvement in Afghanistan is pushing radical elements across the border into Pakistan, and that we risk destabilizing that nuclear-armed country.

No matter. The president has committed us to more lives lost, more bodies and minds maimed, more money spent in a futile military action that will drag on for years.

In his acceptance speech in Oslo, Obama paid tribute to the 1964 Nobel Laureate, Martin Luther King. And he offered a quote from King's Nobel speech: "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: It merely creates new and more complicated ones."

But, said Obama, as a head of state, he has to "face the world as it is."

And with that, he brushed King's words and commitment into the dustbin.

Let me offer, then, some other quotes from King, written in protest against the Vietnam War and just as appropriate now.

"A so-called limited war will leave little more than a calamitous legacy of human suffering, political turmoil, and spiritual disillusionment."

"The stages of history are replete with the chants and choruses of the conquerors of old who came killing in pursuit of peace."

"The security we profess to seek in foreign adventures we will lose in our decaying cities. The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities of a decent America."

"Why has our nation placed itself in the position of being God's military agent on earth, and intervened recklessly in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic? Why have we substituted the arrogant undertaking of policing the whole world for the high task of putting our own house in order?"

"In the days ahead we must not consider it unpatriotic to raise certain basic questions about our national character. We must begin to ask, ‘Why are there over forty million poor people in a nation overflowing with such unbelievable affluence?'"

"One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. How much longer must we play at deadly war games before we heed the plaintive pleas of the unnumbered dead and maimed of past wars?"

"True nonviolence is more than the absence of violence. It is the persistent and determined application of peaceable power to offenses against the community."

In Oslo, Obama said the Nobel award "speaks to our highest aspirations - that for all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate."

"Our actions matter," he said, "and can bend history in the direction of justice."

Yes indeed. And what a tragedy that justice is not the direction we're bending it in.