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The U.S. national interest came first, as Pentagon Planner Seymour Deitchman points out, "in the use of the atom bomb, the Mexican war, the war with Spain over Cuba, the destruction of American Indian tribal society, failure to support the Hungarian rebellion. We were able to rationalize our moral problems, which were real and recognized, because the political and economic problems were greater and more urgent." Similarly, Kashmir is of national interest to Indians, who believe that its loss would put in jeopardy hundreds of other princely states and consequently imperil India's tenuous union itself. It is also of national interest to Moslem Pakistan that Kashmir (80% Moslem itself) be taken into the fold of political Islam.
But the limited wars that the U.S. is now fighting, and doubtless will continue to fight for the next half-century or more, have a moral purpose too. In South Viet Nam, this purpose is to preserve freedom of choice for that country and others near it that the Communists might overwhelm.
As Lyndon Johnson has time and time again explained, the U.S. seeks no territory, seeks no wider war.
No humane man can applaud the cruelties of war, yet no man of dignity can shrink from war if he is to preserve his freedom. Indeed, wars often have the virtue of deciding issues more definitely than diplomacy. Israel exists today not because the Jews were capable negotiators but because they were courageous fighters against the Arabs. India ignored its own sanctimonious praise of peace to seize Portuguese Goa and thus permanently removed that galling thorn from its side. By contrast, the feud between Turkish and Greek Cypriots still festers despite years of negotiations and may never be settled short of full-scale civil war.
War is, in sum, horrible but definitive, repellent but—pending realization of the dream of world order—inevitable. Soldiers in all wars usually manage to make some rueful appraisal of this human dilemma, and the G.I.s in South Viet Nam are no exception. Their catchall comment, endlessly applied to one another's hard-luck stories of great pain or minor difficulty, is a deadpan "Sorry about that."