McNamara Dies Posted by Michael Cohen

Is there a more complicated figure in the history of American defense policy than Robert McNamara? Personally, I find everything about McNamara both endlessly fascinating and incredibly depressing. He was a man whose actions during the Vietnam War simply cannot be forgiven: by 1965 and perhaps earlier he knew the war was wrong. He knew it was a lost cause and yet he continued waging it as Secretary of Defense for years after he had come to that conclusion. After leaving the Pentagon his refusal to speak out against the War only increased his moral culpability. Later McNamara would publicly recognize the error of his ways both in print and in the fascinating Fog Of War.

These public mea culpas were noteworthy and unlike many architects of failed wars (I'm looking at you Don Rumsfeld, Doug Feith, Condi Rice and Colin Powell) McNamara at least had the guts to admit his mistakes and offer a lesson for future generations. Still that late life acknowledgment of wrongdoing does not absolve him of his sins.

As the New York Times put it quite succinctly in 1995:

Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late.

Robert McNamara had blood on his hands and he knew it.

With all that, McNamara's obituary in the New York Times offered two quotes that really jumped out at me, because they offer object lessons for the wars America is waging today:

By 1962, the White House and the Pentagon devised a new strategy of counterinsurgency to combat what Mr. McNamara called the tactics of “terror, extortion, and assassination” by communist guerrillas. The call led to the creation of American special forces like the Green Berets and secret paramilitary operations throughout Asia and Latin America.“Counterinsurgency became an almost ridiculous battle cry,” said Robert Amory, who in 1962 stepped down after nine years as the C.I.A.’s deputy director of intelligence to become the White House budget officer for classified programs.

Sound familiar? It is worth remembering that today's debate over counter-insurgency is not new and that the focus on COIN as a means of fighting Communism in the early 1960s would eventually graduate to the conventional military struggle, which killed so many Americans - and many more Vietnamese -- over the next 15 years. It's not to say this will happen in Afghanistan, but it's something that we have a responsibility to be cognizant of today.

This is particularly true in light of something that McNamara said in Fog of War, which should gnaw at every policymaker who sends America's fighting men and women overseas:

“War is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend,” Mr. McNamara concluded. “Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.”

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One thing that Robert McNamara and his fellow proponent of bombing of North Vietnam, Walt Rostow, have in common is that they both were targeting specialists in World War II. Since these men had no real knowledge of the Third World, they assume that what they perceived to have worked for Germany and Japan could have a impact on North Vietnam. In the end it was the ignorance of McNamara and Rostow that helped persuaded LBJ to escalate the Vietnam War. When the bombing failed to work, McNamara lost hope while Rostow was still a true believer.

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There always remained a large, and largely unacknowledged, gap between Robert McNamara's gradually evolving conviction that the American war effort in Vietnam was unlikely to succeed and was not worth its costs and the conviction of anti-war protesters that the war was "wrong."

The anti-war movement convinced itself that the alternative to war in Indochina was, naturally, peace; nothing about the prospect of a Communist victory there seemed to them remotely as bad as the consequences of resistance to the Communist forces there. This was never something McNamara believed, and it helped account for the dilemma he constructed for himself after having done so much to shape American policy in Indochina during the Kennedy administration and the Johnson administration's early years. He could see Vietnam was turning into a disaster, but the time when America could walk away without accepting responsibility for a different kind of geopolitical and humanitarian disaster was long past.

This gap also accounts for the incomprehension among many of the Americans most opposed to the Vietnam war effort of McNamara's post-Vietnam career. They were, and remain convinced that he must be wracked with guilt over his role in Vietnam; they are bitter that he admitted mistakes but fell short, in their view, of confessing to sin. They were also sure his long tenure at the World Bank must have been part of McNamara's effort to clear his conscience, as opposed to having been something he might have done even if Vietnam had never happened. There is every reason to think the gap between the respective perceptions of McNamara and his mostly younger antiwar critics was nearly as great at the time of his death as it was when he held public office.

A couple of incidental comments: the Kennedy administration's infatuation with counterinsurgency as an alternative to "big army" conventional warfare did not survive the change in admininstrations after Kennedy's murder. Under Johnson, the American military fought the kind of war it wanted to fight, a kind of war that rejected every tenet of counterinsurgency known at the time and in practice now.

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