Warning By Johnson

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31153, 1 September 1966, Page 15

Warning By Johnson

(N.Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright) WASHINGTON, August 31.

President Johnson warned yesterday that the United States and allied nations might face a series of explosive crises, like the Vietnam conflict, if they did not do more to root out the basic causes of war.

He pledged that the United States would use its military might if necessary to defend nations from aggression, but it would also give whatever help it could to assist needy countries in the major problems of their own development.

The President, referring to the problems besetting hundreds of millions of people in Asia—including those in

North and South Vietnam—said: “Where we can help, we will.”

Addressing the National Convenion of the American Legion, the biggest United States former servicemen’s organisation, he said American help would be forthcoming whether it was needed for development, education, health or other progressive measures. “If our might is needed to help them defend themselves from aggression supported from without, it will be there,” Mr Johnson said. “For those of you who have borne arms for our country know that an armistice can end the fighting without ending the war. “Only when we root out the very causes of war—the poverty of man’s body, the privation of his spirit, the imprisonment of his liberties—will there be a final surrender of violence itself,” he went on.

"That is our aim in Asia—as it has been our aim twice this century in Asia. “The vast sums we must spend to stop aggression could, when the aggression is ended, become the means of reconciliation and reconstruction,” he said. President Johnson said even self-interested people must see that the years ahead would call for imagination and compassion by the United States as well as courage. As far as Vietnam was concerned, he said, the Communists had done the United States and its allies one service by making it clear that the conflict was meant to be just the opening salvo in a series of “wars of liberation.” This ideological phrase had served simply to show that the poor nations faced a myriad of problems which provided fertile ground for Communist exploitation, he said.