McNamara speaks, finally, on Iraq


Posted by Helena Cobban
January 26, 2004 1:14 PM EST | Link
Filed in Iraq 2003 thru June 2005

Robert McNamara, the man who as US Defense Secretary in the 1960s was the architect of the US escalation in Vietnam, has until now been reticent in criticizing George DUH-bya's war on Iraq. This silence was all the more surprising because of the lengths the 87-year-old McNamara has gone to over the past decade to understand, excoriate, and apologize for the misdeeds he and his colleagues committed in Vietnam.

Now, he has spoken. Doug Saunders, a columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail, called McNamara recently at his office in Washington DC and asked him to apply the lessons he learned about Vietnam to the present situation in Iraq.

(I found this story thru a comment "Munguza" left on Yankeedoodle's "Today in Iraq" blog). Here's how Saunders described McNamara's response to his question:

    "We're misusing our influence," he said in a staccato voice that had lost none of its rapid-fire engagement. "It's just wrong what we're doing. It's morally wrong, it's politically wrong, it's economically wrong."


    While he did not want to talk on the record about specific military decisions made [by] Mr. Rumsfeld, he said the United States is fighting a war that he believes is totally unnecessary and has managed to destroy important relationships with potential allies. "There have been times in the last year when I was just utterly disgusted by our position, the United States' position vis-à-vis the other nations of the world."

In 1995, McNamara wrote a book titled In Retrospect that contains an extended, almost confessional re-evaluation of the role he, his bosses (Presidents JFK and Johnson), and his colleagues in those two administrations played in the US-Vietnam war.

More recently, he has starred in, and helped to work on, the feature-length documentary "The Fog of War",which also deals with the US misdeeds with regard to Vietnam. (Several of my friends in DC have said they loved the movie, and that it's been playing to packed houses up there. It hasn't come to Charlottesville yet, and I didn't get a chance to see it when I was in DC last week.)

In the 1995 book, McNamara published a list of the 11 specific mistakes he believed the United States made in its handling of Vietnam in the 1960s. Saunders provides that list as a "sidebar" to his column--in the online version, it's presented at the bottom. He writes:

    I have always been wary of comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq. The circumstances are profoundly different, and the scale of conflict and death is nowhere near the same...

    But to read Mr. McNamara's 1995 list today (see sidebar) is to read an uncanny analysis of the missteps of the Iraq campaign. He told me that this list has come to haunt him as he watches the Mesopotamian misadventure unfold.

    Chief among the discoveries that led him to see Vietnam as a mistake, he said, was his realization that the United States could not, by itself, properly analyze the actions and ground-level conditions necessary to achieve the complex and ambiguous goals of a war -- reversing the influence of communism in Asia, in Vietnam's case, or bringing democracy to the Arab world, in Iraq's.

    "And the reason I feel that is that we're not omniscient," he said. "And we've demonstrated that in Iraq, I think." He pointed to Washington's failure to appreciate the complexities of Iraqi culture, and therefore to anticipate the extended guerrilla war it is now engaged in -- a chief mistake of Vietnam. Without the full involvement of other major nations, he said, such mistakes will always be made.

    "And if we can't persuade other nations with comparable values and comparable interests of the merit of our course, we should reconsider the course, and very likely change it. And if we'd followed that rule, we wouldn't have been in Vietnam, because there wasn't one single major ally, not France or Britain or Germany or Japan, that agreed with our course or stood beside us there. And we wouldn't be in Iraq."

So Bob McNamara: thanks for having spoken out at last.

We could wish you'd done so a whole lot earlier-- this time last year would have beeen just great. But better late than never. I guess.



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