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VIEW FROM THE MIDDLE: McNamara, Medvedev and Obama
Filed by the ‘Man In The Middle’ July 7th, 2009:
I find it ironic that on the very day our Mr. Obama is in Russia pushing the ‘reset’ button on our relationship with the former Soviet Union, word arrived of the passing of the last of the true cold warriors, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
He served under Kennedy and then Johnson, longer than any other Secretary in history. He became a polarizing figure, and Vietnam became known as McNamara’s war. A brilliant man from humble beginnings, he rose through the ranks of corporate America to reach the highest levels of the Washington power elite. After being shoved out of the Pentagon by LBJ, he served as president of the World Bank for 16 years. At a time when most of his colleagues had either retired or passed on, McNamara set up shop on K Street and was a sought-after consultant. However, despite his many accomplishments, he will forever be harshly remembered as “the Architect of the Vietnam war.” In his 1995 mea culpa of the war, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” he did not apologize for his involvement, but did admit to errors in judgment and strategic miscalculations and characterized himself as a war criminal.
McNamara more than any figure in recent U. S. history was responsible for the build up of our nuclear arsenal and the development of the multiple-warhead missile. It is extremely ironic on the day of McNamara’s death, the man who helped implement last year’s invasion of Georgia (Russian President Dimity Medvedev) met with the man who just dumped 21,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan (our own Big ‘O’) to discuss a meaningless reduction in nuclear weapons. Both men would have better served their nations today had they just sat in silence and watched Errol Morris’s Academy Award-winning documentary “The Fog Of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara.” In the words of Mr. McNamara, “Any military commander who is honest with himself, or with those he’s speaking to, will admit that he has made mistakes in the application of military power. He’s killed people unnecessarily — his own troops or other troops — through mistakes, through errors of judgment. A hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands, maybe even a hundred thousand. But, he hasn’t destroyed nations. And the conventional wisdom is don’t make the same mistake twice, learn from your mistakes. And we all do. Maybe we make the same mistake three times, but hopefully not four or five. They’ll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. You make one mistake and you’re going to destroy nations.”
Perhaps Mr. Obama can screen this film at his next White House cocktail party.
