- 'Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future
generations to explain why."
-
- With those words, written nine years ago, Robert McNamara
began an extraordinary final phase of his career -- devoted to chronicling
the errors, delusions and false assumptions that turned him into the chief
architect and most prominent promoter of the Vietnam war.
-
- No historic figure has put so much effort into self-examination:
At the age of 87, he has now written three very detailed and analytical
books, and starred in one very good movie, devoted to the fundamental mistakes
that led the United States into the most politically costly and least successful
war in its history.
-
- What, then, does he think about Iraq? Until now, the
former secretary of defence has avoided comment on the actions of that
job's current occupant, Donald Rumsfeld. The two are often compared to
each other in their autocratic leadership styles and in their technocratic,
numbers-driven approaches to war. And their wars, of course, are often
likened. But Robert McNamara has insisted in staying out of the fray.
-
- He decided to break his silence on Iraq when I called
him up the other day at his Washington office. I told him that his carefully
enumerated lists of historic lessons from Vietnam were in danger of being
ignored. He agreed, and told me that he was deeply frustrated to see history
repeating itself.
-
- "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 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--vis the other nations of the world."
-
- On Monday night, we heard the United States at its very
worst with George W. Bush's caustic State of the Union address, in which
he declared, over and over, that America is serving God's will directly
and does not need "a permission slip" from other nations since
"the cause we serve is right, because it is the cause of all mankind."
-
- That vision of manifest destiny, stripped of any larger
view, has led down some unfortunate roads. The Iraq action, which would
have been conducted in some form or another at some point under any imaginable
government, would have been far better conceived if its executors had read
Mr. McNamara's works instead of the Book of Revelation.
-
- In 1995, in his memoir In Retrospect, Mr. McNamara published
a list of the 11 specific mistakes he believed the United States had made
in and around the Vietnam war that still had relevance in the very different
political and military climate of the 21st century.
-
- 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. Vietnam was a small nation
engaged in a civil war that Americans misread as a Chinese incursion on
all of Asia, while Iraq has been strangled by one of history's worst totalitarian
dictators. The American mistake was its belief that the dictator's removal
would be sufficient.
-
- 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."
-
- In his recent book Wilson's Ghost, Mr. McNamara argued
that military forces should sometimes be used to oust dictators guilty
of grave crimes against humanity. However, he said, this can succeed politically
and militarily only if it is done with broad international support under
the aegis of a body such as the United Nations (which helped intervene
in East Timor) or NATO (which led the charge in the Balkans).
-
- "The United States is today the strongest power
in the world, politically, economically and militarily, and I think it
will continue to be so for decades ahead, if not for the whole century,"
he told me. "But I do not believe, with one qualification, that it
should ever, ever use that power unilaterally -- the one qualification
being the unlikely event we had to use it to defend the continental U.S.,
Alaska or Hawaii."
-
- Mr. McNamara said it is particularly upsetting to see
that the White House administration has ignored or failed to heed key recommendations
coming from military officers on the ground in Iraq -- a crucial and oft-repeated
mistake in Vietnam. American military officials in Iraq complained early
that their forces were ill-equipped for the complex work of nation-building
and policing, but the White House has until very recently refused to discuss
using UN peacekeeping forces for such work.
-
- Last week, the United States indicated that it is seeking
the UN's assistance in the nation-building effort, a move that Mr. McNamara
said is vital if the war is ever to be brought to an end, and civil life
restored in Iraq.
-
- "Many people, myself among them, thought the United
Nations should have played a much greater role in connection with Iraq
than it has, and I'm personally very pleased to see that the administration
is thinking today of increasing the role of the UN. . . . I hope the UN
will accept."
-
- To appreciate the staggering scale of the lessons Mr.
McNamara has learned, everyone ought to see the new feature documentary
about him, The Fog of War. Its director, Errol Morris, is certainly the
best non-fiction filmmaker alive (his Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is
the most action-packed movie ever made about the philosophy of being).
This film, focused tightly on the bombings of Japan in the Second World
War and Vietnam in the 1960s, offers a profound fourth volume to Mr. McNamara's
continuing mea culpa.
-
- In it, he suggests repeatedly that his faith in superior
military technology and the scientific potential of data processing (he
was known to his 1960s critics as "an IBM machine with legs")
led him to underestimate the difficulties and complexities of the cultures
in which he was fighting.
-
- The same fundamental fallacy, he said, is present today.
Even though computerized and laser-guided weapons allow campaigns to be
waged with only a few dozen American deaths and hundreds of foreign deaths
(as opposed to the tens of thousands of American deaths and hundreds of
thousands of Vietnamese deaths in the 1960s and 1970s), it has become no
easier to achieve society-transforming military goals, or to extricate
yourself from an invaded nation.
-
- "The new circumstances and new technology didn't
help us in Iraq, and the issue there was allegedly the risk of proliferation
of nuclear weapons. You can't get anything more fundamental than that.
The case for this was certainly made forcefully -- I think erroneously,
but it was very well made. . . . And now we've just got to repair these
fissures, these breaks in our relationship with many, many important powers
in the world, and many important institutions."
-
- He said many lives have been unnecessarily lost around
the world because the United States has refused to support the International
Criminal Court, an institution he believes could have provided an alternative
to war in Iraq.
-
- "Let's think about that in human terms -- you have
to reduce the risk of killing and catastrophe," he said. "We've
got to do that, and we're not paying nearly enough attention to it. And
one illustration is, we don't support things that would have that as their
goal . . . for example, this international court. The U.S. is totally opposed
to it. I think they're absolutely wrong. We've not only refused to support
it, we try to buy off countries that are supporting it."
-
- Mr. McNamara broadly declined to discuss specific decisions
made by Mr. Bush -- "I don't want to get in an argument with Bush
and the administration. I don't think that advances my interests at all,"
he said. But he didn't mind adding that he was dismayed that members of
the Republican administration have likened their position after Sept. 11,
2001, to that of John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which
had been Mr. McNamara's moment of truth. Mr. Bush, he said, wouldn't have
been up to it. And Mr. Kennedy would have handled Iraq differently.
-
- Just over a year ago, Mr. McNamara travelled to Cuba
and learned just how perilous that moment had been: Cuba, Fidel Castro
admitted, had been home to a nuclear arsenal, and he had been willing to
sacrifice his own island nation in order to launch a nuclear attack on
the United States. The world really did come within moments of ending.
-
- More than anything else, this revelation has led Mr.
McNamara to argue that the Kennedy approach to the world ought to be emulated.
Mr. McNamara was the first to argue, based on his own diary, that had he
lived, JFK would have ended the Vietnam war in 1965.
-
- I take that claim with a grain of salt, since I believe
that Mr. Kennedy's record of endlessly reversing himself and caving in
to the authority of his military commanders would have trumped his better
convictions.
-
- Nevertheless, recently declassified documents have lent
the notion credence. And I do believe Mr. McNamara when he says that the
Kennedy taste for international co-operation would have served the world
better than the White House's current with-us-or-against-us approach.
-
- "I don't believe that Kennedy would be reacting
the way Bush is. For one thing, Kennedy reached out. A critic in those
early days of the administration was John Kenneth Galbraith [the Canadian
economist, who believed Vietnam was a bad idea]. And Kennedy reached out,
and appointed him to a high-level position, and he talked to him about
Vietnam. You don't see that today."
-
- McNamara's 11 Lessons
-
- In 1995, former U.S. secretary of defence Robert McNamara
published In Retrospect, the first of his three books dissecting the errors,
myths and miscalculations that led to the Vietnam War, which he now believes
was a serious mistake. Nine years later, most of these lessons seem uncannily
relevant to the Iraq war in its current nation-building, guerrilla-warfare
phase.
-
- We misjudged then -- and we have since -- the geopolitical
intentions of our adversaries . . . and we exaggerated the dangers to the
United States of their actions.
-
- We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in
terms of our own experience. . . . We totally misjudged the political forces
within the country.
-
- We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate
a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
-
- Our judgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound
ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area,
and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
-
- We failed then -- and have since -- to recognize the
limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine.
. . . We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning
the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
-
- We failed to draw Congress and the American people into
a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale
military involvement . . . before we initiated the action.
-
- After the action got under way and unanticipated events
forced us off our planned course . . . we did not fully explain what was
happening and why we were doing what we did.
-
- We did not recognize that neither our people nor our
leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or
country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in
international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every
nation in our image or as we choose.
-
- We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action
. . . should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces
supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
-
- We failed to recognize that in international affairs,
as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are
no immediate solutions. . . . At times, we may have to live with an imperfect,
untidy world.
-
- Underlying many of these errors lay our failure to organize
the top echelons of the executive branch to deal effectively with the extraordinarily
complex range of political and military issues.
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