The Fog Of Wisdom

Conditions: Cold


Hopefully Not An Obituary

Robert McNamara, the brilliant, flawed genius who was best known as the architect of the Vietnam war, passed away this week, aged 93.

One of the last knights of Camelot, of the New Frontier, is gone. Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, former president of Ford Motor Co. and the World Bank, husband, father and chief architect of America's catastrophic war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, passed away at home after years of declining health. He was 93.

"Mr. McNamara is best remembered and in some quarters still reviled for the seven years he spent at the Pentagon and the part he played in waging the Vietnam War," read McNamara's obituary in the Boston Globe. "In 1995, he published his memoir, 'In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,' in which he wrote that he and other top officials were 'terribly wrong' to pursue the war. The controversy that erupted demonstrated the extent to which the nation's scars remained unhealed. Others can also be assigned responsibility for escalating the US role in the conflict during that time: Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. To many, though, it was 'McNamara's war,' as US Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon once put it."
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Vietnam was an exercise in hubris, deception and profiteering that McNamara spent the latter half of his life trying to justify, live down and explain away. The soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan would recognize Robert McNamara, for they were consigned to the grave by McNamara's modern replacements. Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rove, Libby and the other Bush administration officials who ginned up two wars and made abject debacles of both are the modern inheritors of McNamara's curse. As are the soldiers and civilians who have been chewed up and annihilated. As are we all.

Robert McNamara taught us all we needed to know about the folly of war, about aftermath and about regret. Nobody listened, nobody learned, except for the dead.

- truthout.org/

McNamara was many things, and one of the things he did late in his life is revisit the massive mistakes of American warfare (of which he was at the helm, or at least the control room) in his autobiographies, and documentaries. His participation in the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the world literally stood on the brink on Nuclear annihilation, was instrumental in keeping us from going over. One of his greatest concerns was the danger represented by nuclear weapons proliferating throughout the world, due to their nature not allowing for mistakes to be learned from. It is a lesson that we, as a civilization, have so far listened to. But the sabers are still rattled, and countries still intimidate, threaten and even invade each other. So despite our technology, and our wisdom, we still haven't really progressed from the time when we aimed giant guns at each others heads and snarled. Will we ever learn?



- Peace out