Barack McNamara Obama

Why Can't Obama See His Wars Are Unwinnable?

By Ted Rall

Why can't President Obama imagine himself living in a poor village in Pakistan? Why can't he feel the anger and contempt felt by Pakistanis who hear pilotless drone planes buzzing overhead, firing missiles willy-nilly at civilians and guerilla fighters alike, dispatched by a distant enemy too cowardly to put live soldiers and pilots in harm's way? Continue

It is worth reading all of this article by Ted Rall.

Robert Strange McNamara, former US Defense Secretary during the American War against Viet Nam, and therefore another unprosecuted war criminal, recently died. McNamara may have eventually learned some lessons from Viet Nam, and now Barack Obama will also need to learn them.

I liked the closing words of the article:

'....."We didn't know our opposition," concluded McNamara. "So the first lesson is know your opponents. I want to suggest to you that we don't know our potential opponents today."

Actually, it's worse than that. Then, like now, we don't have opponents. We create them.'

This was certainly true in the case of Viet Nam.

Let us never forget that in the Second World War the US government was an ally of Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese, in the war against Japan.

Some of Ho Chi Minh's closest friends were American agents of the OSS, who knew and worked with him intimately. They even supplied US weapons to Ho's Viet Minh guerrillas. They advised Washington that they should continue to support Ho Chi Minh.

Ho Chi Minh and the people of Viet Nam protected American pilots shot down by the Japanese. The Vietnamese saw the Americans as their friends.

After WW2, Ho Chi Minh wrote 8 cables to the US President seeking friendly relations to continue. He got no reply.

Instead, Washington took the advice of the "cold warriors" and decided to double-cross their WW2 ally.

While Ho Chi Minh was proclaiming the independence of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam, supported by arguably 90% of the Vietnamese people, the US government had gone behind his back to secretly assist the return to power of the cruel French colonialists!

Even the returning home of American soldiers to their families after WW2 was delayed, so the Pentagon could use ships and planes to transport 13,000 French troops into Saigon to begin their reconquest.

This was the inevitable beginning of the French/American War against Viet Nam.

An illegal, monstrous war crime - one of the worst war crimes in human history - fought entirely for empire, and capitalist imperialism, and sold to the public entirely by ignorance and lies.

And the 'war' against Viet Nam continues today, in various ways: including a continuing denial of the truth about the war; and denying responsibility and justice to those innocent people still living with the deadly consequences of the war, such as Agent Orange poisoning from the worst chemical warfare campaign in history.

Yes, the US government chose the path of war in Viet Nam, instead of continuing the friendship with the Vietnamese people. They therefore have sole responsibility for all the horrors that followed, and continue into the future.

By creating opponents, instead of friends, some profited handsomely, of course. That is how the ruling class amass their stolen fortunes. They will continue to wage imperialist wars, and the propaganda that serves them, as long as they remain in power.


Bruce McPhie

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And some more thoughts on Robert Strange McNamara, who recently died at age 93:

Bob McNamara Dies

The infamous Bob McNamara Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations has died at 93.

While many in our Vietnam groups will not comment on the passing of such a vile contemptible politician I will offer up my opinions.

The Vietnam War is sometimes referred to as “McNamara’s War”. However, I think he just told Johnson what he wanted to hear and more than likely or so it seems Johnson himself wanted that war; for whatever his reasons. I believe Kennedy had already decided to pull out with troops being sent home when he was killed. Johnson then reversed that policy with McNamara while complicit simply a political pawn as so many of our Secretaries of Defense have become as well as the head military men from the Joint Chiefs have also fallen into that category of telling the nation what the President wants to be told not the facts. In other words there is no disagreement of policy only the lock step of politics and misleading statements. One only has to look at any of the JCS’s that actually stood up recently and how they were put out to pasture. Of course none bothered to during the Vietnam Era and once again just stood in lock step with the lies and deceit.

But as you already know the government cat on military men and women was let out of the bag in 1979 I think it was with another infamous appointed government cabinet member in Secretary Kissinger stating, “Military men are dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy.” (Reporters Woodward and Bernstein 1979)

Evidence continues today of such when the Homeland Security Secretary suggested they keep on eye on returning Veterans as political enemies and such.

So there is no doubt there is government disdain for the military throughout our recent history at least as far back as the 1960’s.

While I will not comment on what my hopes for Mr. McNamara’s death have been; I can tell you the following:

Mr. McNamara and his wiz kids were responsible for the M16 fiasco actually forcing the DOD to go to the untried and untested M16. Mr. McNamara and his computer wiz kids taking such irresponsible action as to cancel the production of the M14 so it would force the hands of the DOD and taking the decision once again out of the military. We do not know how many lives in combat personnel it caused. But I would conclude those men are directly responsible with their political policies. No one held accountable. And I can give many examples of such brave men that lost their lives due to a so called combat assault rifle becoming nothing but a club.

In 1967 more than 5,000 scientists a number of them Nobel laureates delivered a petition asking Johnson/McNamara to end Agent Orange usage in Vietnam .

In 1968 The American Association for the Advancement of Science petitioned McNamara to study the short and long term consequence of using Agent Orange. Some scientists urged the Administration to adhere to the international ban on chemical warfare.

As we all know none of this happened, politics with Johnson/McNamara prevailed and the description of the American Military man by Kissinger took its place in history.

In World War Two the casualties were just over 400,000. There is no doubt in my mind these two men are responsible for at least that many Vietnam Veterans early deaths; if not more. Warriors chemically wounded on the field of battle while our government continues to deny the events as they rewrite not only history but medical history. As one very sick member of our group contended you only have to mention Agent Orange in Congress and it is like turning on the light in a cockroach invested house as they all run to hide under rocks and any cover the politician can find.

Not only was McNamara unconcerned, even though warned, on Agent Orange and the other toxic herbicides with his son safe at home in college; he then as Secretary of Defense approved the actual biological chemical warfare (BCW) testing of our own military men and women in such programs as Project 112 and SHAD. The results in death and disability and what was created the DOD is still protecting while Congress sits by and does little for those Veterans.

Project 112 and SHAD are some other words in Congress that create the run for cover when the lights are turned on.

In addition, McNamara’s lack of concern for State Department Pawns for what many scientists at the time concluded as chemical warfare not only killed or disabled 100’s of thousands of our Veterans but the generational effects of the totally innocent are now coming home to roost.

Former Secretary of Defense Robert (Bob) McNamara during the Vietnam War dead at the age of 93.

He received a better death than he earned.

Charles Kelley ( Vietnam veteran)

Georgia

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McNamara, Architect of Vietnam War, Dies

By Mike Feinsilber and Pete Yost - The Associated Press
Posted : Monday Jul 6, 2009 17:04:05 EDT

WASHINGTON — Robert S. McNamara, the cerebral secretary of defense vilified for his role in escalating the Vietnam War, a disastrous conflict he later denounced as “terribly wrong,” died Monday. He was 93.

McNamara died at 5:30 a.m. at his home, his wife Diana told The Associated Press. She said he had been in failing health for some time.

McNamara was fundamentally associated with the Vietnam War, “McNamara’s war,” the country’s most disastrous foreign venture, the only American war to end in abject withdrawal. Known as a policymaker with a fixation for statistical analysis, McNamara was recruited to run the Pentagon by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 from the presidency of the Ford Motor Co. — where he and a group of colleagues had been known as the “whiz kids.” He stayed in the defense post for seven years, longer than anyone since the job’s creation in 1947.

His association with Vietnam became intensely personal. Even his son, as a Stanford University student, protested against the war while his father was running it. At Harvard, McNamara once had to flee a student mob through underground utility tunnels. Critics mocked McNamara mercilessly; they made much of the fact that his middle name was “Strange.”

After leaving the Pentagon on the verge of a nervous breakdown, McNamara became president of the World Bank and devoted evangelical energies to the belief that improving life in rural communities in developing countries was a more promising path to peace than the buildup of arms and armies.

A private person, McNamara for many years declined to write his memoirs, to lay out his view of the war and his side in his quarrels with his generals. In the early 1990s he began to open up. He told Time magazine in 1991 that he did not think the bombing of North Vietnam — the biggest bombing campaign in history up to that time — would work but he went along with it “because we had to try to prove it would not work, number one, and (because) other people thought it would work.”

Finally, in 1993, after the Cold War ended, he undertook to write his memoirs because some of the lessons of Vietnam were applicable to the post-Cold War period “odd as though it may seem.” “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam” appeared in 1995. McNamara disclosed that by 1967 he had deep misgivings about Vietnam — by then he had lost faith in America ’s capacity to prevail over a guerrilla insurgency that had driven the French from the same jungled countryside. Despite those doubts, he had continued to express public confidence that the application of enough American firepower would cause the Communists to make peace. In that period, the number of U.S. casualties — dead, missing and wounded — went from 7,466 to over 100,000. “We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of our country. But we were wrong. We were terribly wrong,” McNamara, then 78, told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of the book’s release.

The best-selling mea culpa renewed the national debate about the war and prompted bitter criticism against its author. “Where was he when we needed him?” a Boston Globe editorial asked. A New York Times editorial referred to McNamara as offering the war’s dead only a “prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late.” McNamara wrote that he and others had not asked the five most basic questions: “Was it true that the fall of South Vietnam would trigger the fall of all Southeast Asia ? Would that constitute a grave threat to the West’s security? What kind of war — conventional or guerrilla — might develop? Could we win it with U.S. troops fighting alongside the South Vietnamese? Should we not know the answers to all these questions before deciding whether to commit troops?

He discussed similar themes in the 2003 documentary “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.” With the U.S. in the first year of the war in Iraq , it became a popular and timely art-house attraction and won the Oscar for best documentary feature.

The Iraq war, with its similarities to Vietnam , at times brought up McNamara’s name, in many cases in comparison with another unpopular defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld. McNamara was among former secretaries of defense and state who met twice with President George W. Bush in 2006 to discuss Iraq war policies.

In the Kennedy administration, McNamara was a key figure in both the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis 18 months later. The crisis was the closest the world came to a nuclear confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States .

McNamara served as the World Bank president for 12 years. He tripled its loans to developing countries and changed its emphasis from grandiose industrial projects to rural development.

After retiring in 1981, he championed the causes of nuclear disarmament and aid by the richest nation for the world’s poorest. He became a global elder statesman. McNamara’s trademarks were his rimless glasses and slicked down hair and his reliance on quantitative analysis to reach conclusions, calmly promulgated in a husky voice.

He was born June 9, 1916, in San Francisco , son of the sales manager for a wholesale shoe company. At the University of California at Berkeley , he majored in mathematics, economics and philosophy. As a professor at the Harvard Business School when World War II started, he helped train Army Air Corps officers in cost-effective statistical control. In 1943, he was commissioned an Army officer and joined a team of young officers who developed a new field of statistical control of supplies.

McNamara and his colleagues sold themselves to the Ford organization as a package and revitalized the company. The group became known as the “whiz kids” and McNamara was named the first Ford president who was not a descendant of Henry Ford.

A month later, the newly elected Kennedy invited McNamara, a registered Republican, to join his Cabinet. Taking the $25,000-a-year job cost McNamara $3 million in profit from Ford stocks and options.

As defense chief, McNamara reshaped America ’s armed forces for “flexible response” and away from the nuclear “massive retaliation” doctrine espoused by former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. He asserted civilian control of the Pentagon and applied cost-accounting techniques and computerized systems analysis to defense spending. Early on, Kennedy regarded South Vietnam as an area threatened by Communist aggression and a proving ground for his new emphasis on counterinsurgency forces. A believer in the domino theory — that countries could fall to communism like a row of dominoes — Kennedy dispatched U.S. “advisers” to bolster the Saigon government. Their numbers surpassed 16,000 by the time of his assassination.

Following Kennedy’s death, President Lyndon Johnson retained McNamara as “the best in the lot” of Kennedy Cabinet members and the man to keep Vietnam from falling to the Communists.

When U.S. naval vessels were allegedly attacked off the North Vietnamese coast in 1964, McNamara lobbied Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which Johnson used as the equivalent of a congressional declaration of war.

McNamara visited Vietnam — the first of many trips — and returned predicting that American intervention would enable the South Vietnamese, despite internal feuds, to stand by themselves “by the end of 1965.”

That was an early forerunner of a seemingly endless string of official “light at the end of the tunnel” predictions of American success. Each was followed by more warfare, more American troops, more American casualties, more American bombing, more North Vietnamese infiltration — and more predictions of an early end to America ’s commitment.

As the years passed, the war became increasingly controversial. Many young men did not want to die for a corrupt Saigon government and a cause whose purpose was not clear. Among those who marched protest was a young American attending Oxford University , Bill Clinton. Another protester, in California , was Craig McNamara, a teenager when his father ran the war.

In 1984, in an interview with Paul Hendrickson of the Washington Post, Craig recalled how McNamara would not talk about Vietnam for years afterward.

“Nobody can get anywhere on Vietnam with my father, including me,” Craig said. “It’s just not in his scope to communicate his deepest thoughts and feelings to me.”

Toward the end, McNamara found himself pitted against the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who wanted unremitting and wide-ranging bombing of the North.

He became openly skeptical about the effectiveness of bombing the north to cut down the infiltration of men and war supplies to the south. At McNamara’s request, Johnson halted the bombing in December 1965 to induce North Vietnam to enter into peace negotiations. Nothing happened and Johnson resumed the bombing at the end of January.

McNamara, with Paul Warnke and Paul Nitze, privately transmitted a peace proposal to the North Vietnamese in August 1967. It was rejected in October. With 1,000 Americans now dying each month, McNamara recommended a bombing halt, a freeze in U.S. troop levels and a turnover of war responsibility to Saigon; Johnson rejected the idea.

The president lost faith in his secretary. McNamara would later write that he didn’t know if he quit or was fired. At a Feb. 29, 1968, retirement ceremony, he was overcome with emotion and could not speak. Johnson put an arm around his shoulder and led him from the room.

McNamara’s first wife, Margaret, whom he met in college, died of cancer in 1981; they had two daughters and a son. In 2004, at age 88, he married Italian-born widow Diana Masieri Byfield.

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