This isn't the first time I have heard the music of war as a moral issue. It isn't the first time that I have heard about a global menace which must be fought in a poor country without resources to protect the American heartland. I have heard before that we should not calculate the cost of freedom for ourselves and others.
In North Vietnam people are not free to elect their leaders or to exercise their religion. South Vietnam's government is corrupt but we are working to develop a democratic third force while reforming the South Vietnamese generals who run South Vietnam. Our troops are there to give South Vietnam the time it needs to develop its own army, democratic institutions, and corruption free leaders. We owe the Vietnamese people a chance at our freedoms. If we do not send the American army to Vietnam we will have to send more troops to fight a bigger war in a more important country.
In 1965 America and the world bought cars, televisions, record players, and steel from American factories. While the United States was spending billions in Vietnam, ostensibly in part for moral reasons, Japan and the East Asian Tigers built industries which ultimately put Americans out of work. In 1965 the United States Army didn't buy uniforms from China. In 1965 the idea that General Motors or an American megabank might have to declare bankruptcy lived in the rantings of lunatics. In 1965 it was debatable whether an economically dominant United States could afford an ideological war fought in a country without resources. Can a country whose uniforms and finances depend upon Chinese factories and Chinese central bankers afford an ideological war, a war without costs?
Imperial Spain fought endless ideological wars against Protestant heretics with money borrowed from Italian bankers from the 1540's to 1648. It fought them in Germany, in the Netherlands, and tried to eradicate a base of heresy in England. Madrid was not controlled by a nest of fanatics. Spain's "realistic" politicians and generals understood that Spain's position in the world was threatened by dangerous rebels and dangerous countries which supported the rebels.
When the bankers stopped lending, Spain stopped fighting ideological wars. When Spain started its ideological wars it was the greatest military power in Europe, when its wars for morality ended Spain was an economic wasteland and a second rate military power. Sixteenth and Seventeenth century Spain is not the United States in 2009, Great Britain in 1945 or the Soviet Union in 1989; but it is proof of an ironclad rule of history that Empires end when they run out of money for armies and wars.