Robert McNamara has died at age 93. Although he eventually, 20 years ex post facto, took responsibilty for his awful mistakes and falsehood during the disastrous War in Vietnam, his failures continue to haunt us. His inability to accurately and honestly assess what was and was not happening on the ground, coupled with his pre-occupation with thwarting Communism regardless of whether it was truly threatening us, caused him to make errors in judgment that cost our country its standing in the world as well as enormous loss of life and treasure. Here’s what David Halberstam, perhaps his harshest critic, had to say about him in THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST:
“McNamara, the ultimate technocrat, was a prisoner of his own background . . . unable, as indeed was the country which sponsored him, to adapt his values and his terms to Vietnamese realities. Since any real indices and truly factual estimates of the war would immediately have shown its bankruptcy, the McNamara trips became part of a vast unwitting and elaborate charade, the institutionalizing and legitimizing of a hopeless lie.”
It is the “institutionalizing and legitimizing of a hopeless lie” that characterized the actions, words and even beliefs of the Bush administration with Dick Cheney in the role of McNamara. Not only were the results the same – loss of respect by other nations and loss of life and treasure in Iraq, Afghanistan and the U.S. – but the lies that we were fed, many of which have been revealed as such, resulted in the same hypocrisy and mismanagement. Tragically, it appears that we are destined to keep asserting some of the same rationales for our continued presence in Iraq as well as our escalation of the War in Afghanistan. If McNamara’s life serves any lasting purpose, it is that using lies to justify immoral behavior has been and always will be bankrupt and only result in tragic losses. Is anyone who has the power to prevent such deception on such a massive scale from happening paying attention? McNamara, unable to change either his own actions or the world view and decisions of Lyndon Johnson, had this to say as early as 1966, even as the buildup of U.S. forces continued and Cold War tensions gripped Europe. He said it was “a gross oversimplification to regard Communism as the central factor in every conflict throughout the underdeveloped word . . . The United States has no mandate from on high to police the world and no inclination to do so.” If only…
And here’s what today’s Washington Post commemoration of his life had to say about his failures:
“McNamara acknowledged late in his Pentagon tenure that the bombing of North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh trail supply line could not cripple the Vietcong because the Vietcong hardly needed any supplies other than ammunition. But as critics pointed out and as he admitted many years later, he was unable or unwilling to translate these assessments into policy reversals that would extricate the Johnson administration from the Asian morass.”
Is there anyone willing and able to extricate our armed forces from the impossible missions they continue to kill and die for? What will it take for enough of us to become sufficiently outraged and morally distraught that we force our leaders to follow us? McNamara’s apology at 79 is both a good and bad example of what happens if we wait for folks to see the error of their ways. Yes, he eventually took responsibility, but 20 years had to pass for him to do so. 20 years from now, will Bush and Cheney ask for forgiveness? What will the intervening years bring to the countries upon which their ineptitude wreaked havoc and what will it do to our country and to the servicemen and women who were requried to enact the woeful policies and who suffered immeasurably in so doing? It is far too long to wait to begin to atone for what we have wrought…