Truthdig - Reports - McNamara’s Evil Lives On »
Posted By dissent 7 months ago in Political OpinionWhy not speak ill of the dead?
Robert McNamara, who died this week, was a complex man—charming even, in a blustery way, and someone I found quite thoughtful when I interviewed him. In the third act of his life he was often an advocate for enlightened positions on world poverty and the dangers of the nuclear arms race. But whatever his better nature, it was the stark evil he perpetrated as secretary of defense that must indelibly frame our memory of him.
To not speak out fully because of respect for the deceased would be to mock the memory of the millions of innocent people McNamara caused to be maimed and killed in a war that he later freely admitted never made any sense. Much has been made of the fact that he recanted his support for the war, but that came 20 years after the holocaust he visited upon Vietnam was over.
Is holocaust too emotionally charged a word? How many millions of dead innocent civilians does it take to qualify labels like holocaust, genocide or terrorism? How many of the limbless victims of his fragmentation bombs and land mines whom I saw in Vietnam during and after the war? Or are America’s leaders always to be exempted from such questions? Perhaps if McNamara had been held legally accountable for his actions, the architects of the Iraq debacle might have paused.
Instead, McNamara was honored with the Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson, to whom he had written a private memo nine months earlier offering this assessment of their Vietnam carnage: “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”
He knew it then, and, give him this, the dimensions of that horror never left him. When I interviewed him for the Los Angeles Times in 1995, after the publication of his confessional memoir, his assessment of the madness he had unleashed was all too clear:
“Look, we dropped three to four times the tonnage on that tiny little area as were dropped by the Allies in all of the theaters in World War II over a period of five years. It was unbelievable. We killed—there were killed—3,200,000 Vietnamese, excluding the South Vietnamese military. My God! The killing, the tonnage—it was fantastic. The problem was that we were trying to do something that was militarily impossible—we were trying to break the will; I don’t think we can break the will by bombing short of genocide.”
We—no, he—couldn’t break their will because their fight was for national independence. They had defeated the French and would defeat the Americans who took over when French colonialists gave up the ghost. The war was a lie from the first.
Read Full Story at truthdig.com »
208 Views Share Story 7 Comments Report
Submitted By:
dissent
we live in a culture of war.
let's make it a culture of peace.
"my country is the world. and my religion is to ...
RSS Join the Discussion
+ Add CommentComments So Far: 7 (view all)
-
75%
hyperbola7 months ago
This comment is below the standard viewing threshold View It »
The parallels between McNamara and Rumsfeld are striking. Do you suppose that Rumsfeld will ever the "minimal honor" to admit his role in war crimes? Do you suppose that Americans will ever start trying their own monsters for the crimes against humanity that they commit?
Reply
Here is an excellent article about Rumsfeld from a former member of our National Security Council. The corruption and war crimes of our elite have NOT changed between McNamara and Rumsfeld.
The Tragedy of Donald Rumsfeld
The Undertaker's Tally
On a farewell flight to Baghdad in early December 2006, the departing Secretary of Defense reminisced about his start in politics more than forty years before. Aides leaned in to listen intently, but came away with no memorable revelations. It hardly mattered. As usual with this man who dominated government as no cabinet officer before him -- including the power-ravenous Henry Kissinger he so despised and outdid in effect, if not celebrity -- authentic history and Don Rumsfeld's version of it bore little resemblance.....
... As with much to come, a darker thread lay beneath the surface from the start. In a Republican primary tantamount to election, he was outwardly the boyish, speak-no-evil, underfunded, underdog challenger of an old party stalwart set to inherit the open seat. In fact, he was generously financed by wealthy friends, while his operatives -- including Jeb Stuart Magruder of later Watergate infamy -- furtively harried and smeared his opponent, using tactics never traced to Rumsfeld....
...Then, as afterward, he had no authentic qualifications or independent achievements. But that was always masked by the same muscular, aggressive style he took onto the mat as an Ivy League wrestler -- "sharp elbows," a meeker, envious colleague called it -- as well as by the flaccid banality of most of the GOP in the 1960s. The Republican Party Rumsfeld strode into was already caught between the wasting death of Eisenhower worldliness and moderation (with Richard Nixon's haunted succession in the wings) and a fitful right-wing urge to seize control that, in little more than a decade, would deliver the Reagan Reaction....-
75%
hyperbola7 months ago
This comment is below the standard viewing threshold View It »
Rumsfeld's own rightist mentality, his New Deal-phobic corporatist cant and Cold War chauvinism, came dressed more in modish vigor than telltale substance -- and he was already attracted by a tough-minded layman's zeal for the era's pre-micro-processing but grandly prospering military technology....
Reply
.... When money or force needed to be applied to Asians, Arabs, Latins, or Africans, a crisp briefing by some underling who had read the necessary memos would always do. Caught up as we all have been in Rumsfeld's kinetic, churlish descent into the bloody chaos of his Iraq, it has been easy to neglect how richly cultural it all was from the beginning -- America's haunted half-century of vast might and presumption set beside our still vaster ignorance and irresponsibility. It was in 1963, during Don Rumsfeld's first months in Congress, that the Iraqi Ba'ath Party -- since 1959 recruited, funded, marshaled and directed by the CIA, and trailing a twenty-six-year-old Tikriti street thug named Saddam Hussein (himself a CIA-paid assassin) along with lists of hundreds of left-leaning Iraqi political figures and professionals to be murdered after the coup -- seized power in Baghdad.
-
-
-
-
100%
dissent7 months ago
This comment is below the standard viewing threshold View It »
his contrition came 20 years after the fact.
Reply
fta: Much has been made of the fact that he recanted his support for the war, but that came 20 years after the holocaust he visited upon Vietnam was over.
by his own admission he is responsible for "3,200,000 Vietnamese, excluding the South Vietnamese military".
mcanamara: We killed—there were killed—3,200,000 Vietnamese, excluding the South Vietnamese military. My God! The killing, the tonnage—it was fantastic.
changing in mid-sentence his use of the personal pronoun "we" to the non-person subject-verb agreement "there were" is telling and it makes even his acceptance of responsibility doubtful. he has taken none.
rumsfeld will do the same should history run the same course on iraq as it did with vietnam. in fact, he already has but he said it much more succinctly and bluntly than mcnamara ever did when he shrugged and said, "stuff happens."
contrition may lesson the sentence. it seldom drops the charge.
mcnamara was a war criminal - pure and simple. just because he looked and talked like everybody's ideal kindly grandfather doesn't make that any less a fact
-
-
100%
sinophil497 months ago
This comment is below the standard viewing threshold View It »
Somewhere around 1974-75, my selective service status became 1-A. I knew I would be bound for Vietnam. Fortunately for me, Saigon fell and the US withdrew its forces. I never got called up to active duty.
Reply
You can bet that I hated Nixon and McNamara. With the passage of time, I no longer hate these men from a personal standpoint. However, I do still despise them for the horrors they brought down on this tiny 3rd world nation that started out simply fighting the French to gain its independence.
It is one of history's greatest tragedies that George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld failed to learn the painful lessons of Vietnam. Although the circumstances of the conception of the Iraq occupation are different from the Vietnam invasion, the consequences on the hapless invaded country, on its people, the effect on the people of the USA, and the international prestige of our nation are hauntingly similar.
More News
LA Times
Drivers of recalled Toyota Prius and Lexus hybrids advised to monitor brakes
As storm approaches Southern California, evacuations ordered for L.A. hillsides
Some icebreakers at the Olympics
FDA aims to rein in radiation-based medical scans
Iran begins plan to produce higher-grade uranium, official says
Add a Comment
Sign In With Your Propeller Account
Please keep your comments relevant to this story.
To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br /> tags.