Mcnamara's ghost
Robert McNamara died the other day as seven American soldiers
were killed in Afghanistan.
It wasn’t the deaths on the same day that
made me remember McNamara’s folly.
It was the sense that McNamara’s
ghost is hovering over the new graveyard of America’s future.
McNamara’s team of Ivy Leaguers was dubbed “the best and the brightest”
by the disillusioned war correspondent David Halberstam. They were deluded by
their arrogance into believing computer-driven measures of success, like body
counts. Though liberal and secular in temperment, they held a faith-based belief
in victory. Fifty-eight thousand Americans died, along with countless
Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians, because of these best and brightest. Not
one of them went to jail. McNamara went to the World Bank.
Today
another Ivy League president has placed his faith in Ivy League generals and an
inbred crowd of three hundred national security advisers drawn from the same
elite circles. They are the new best-and-brightest, and I believe history will
show they are marching to folly in their “Long War.”
General Petraeus is
an Ivy Leaguer. So is his surrogate spokesman in Washington, John Nagl at the
think tank of the best-and-brightest, the Center for a New American Security. So
is Gen. Stanley McChystal, the Special Operations spook presiding over
Afghanistan and Pakistan. So are Petraeus’ Harvard collaborators on the new
Marine and Army counterinsurgency manual. So is their top counterinsurgency
guru, David Kilkullen, who writes of reviving the Vietnam Phoenix program of
detention and targeted killings, not only in Afghanistan, but globally. [For
dummies, Phoenix involved the detention, torture and killing of 25,000 alleged
Vietcong civilians, and the rounding up millions of peasants into “strategic
hamlets” to protect them from any Vietcong still in the jungle. The debacle was
terminated in 1971, but Kilcullen, who wasn’t born then, keeps hope alive,
saying the program was misunderstood. McNamara would have loved Kilcullen, a
Ph.D who openly believes in “armed social science.”
I first heard of
Robert McNamara as an undergraduate editor at the University of Michigan, when a
dean of humanities told me that McNamara, a UM graduate and president of Ford
Motors, was an exceptionally bright man with whom dialogue about war and peace
was finally possible.
I was skeptical, however, of McNamara’s
application of scientific management techniques to corporate, government and
military policy. I couldn’t understand the mystique of intelligence, detached as
it was from an understanding of a world in unpredictable transition.
From the perspective of McNamara’s funeral, we can take a reckoning.
The Vietnam War was the greatest American folly of the twentieth-century.
Applied to large universities, the same scientific management approaches
provoked the Free Speech Movement. And of course, Ford is in ruins.
The
brightest were clueless and, in Leonard Cohen’s verse,
When the very
good have stopped their quest
The very worst are called the best.
For what earthly purpose did those seven Americans die in southern
Afghanistan? Are there al Qaeda there? Not by anyone’s account. If they were
fighting the Taliban as distinct from local people, the reasons are elusive.
Apparently the Taliban of southern Afghanistan are part of a host organization
that will welcome the return of al Qaeda whom, we are warned, will use their new
caves to plot strikes against our homeland.
You can have the IQ of a
plant to smell this stupidity.
The Pentagon predicts an 18-month war
for southern Afghanistan before they can clear, build, hold and hand over the
rubble to an Afghan army inferior to the Taliban.
The logical move now
for the Taliban would be to draw the young Americans into a bloody quagmire in
Kandahar and Helmand, then turn up elsewhere using hit-and-run attacks as they
did this week against the gates of NATO or isolated American bases elsewhere.
In an example of further idiocy masked as intelligence, a Pentagon
spokesman yesterday said the seven deaths were “what we expected.” [LAT, July 7]
The Taliban and “other insurgents” had engaged in “less direct combat than was
expected by the military”, Nagl of the CNAS told the press. [LAT, July 7]. They
Taliban and these “other insurgents” used roadside bombs instead of throwing
themselves in front of the American guns. This was a surprise. That’s what
happens when you go into “Indian country”, said a Pentagon official.
In
more dangerous Pakistan, meanwhile, the best-and-brightest are high-fiving
themselves after pressuring the wary Pakistan army into invading the Swat Valley
and preparing to assault South Waziristan. This operation has created more
casualties than any time since Pakistan was founded and, according to the NY
Times, American aid workers are being barred from refugee camps where
pro-Taliban forces distribute food and medicine paid for by American taxpayers.
In a recent incident obscured by the fog of war, the Taliban last week
apparently attacked a site connected with Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
In Iraq meanwhile, the Pentagon and mainstream media are upset by the
very Shi’a coalition put in power by the American military bragging about the US
withdrawal and holding a national day of celebration. Only the brightest are
blind to the American effort to disguise failure in Iraq with a decent interval,
as orchestrated by Henry Kissinger in Vietnam.
None of this makes any
Americans safer. If anything, more civilians will grow to hate us in both
countries, some of those civilians will join the Taliban or al Qaeda, the
Europeans will soon be abandoning the NATO military mission, Russia will be
enjoying payback for what the Americans did to them in Afghanistan, and
President Obama will be trapped like Gulliver in a Long War he cannot afford,
can never win and dare not lose.
The best and brightest, by their own
definition, are incapable of being wrong. McNamara couldn’t admit his mistake
for decades and still remained at loss for words in the painful final moments of
the film Fog of War.
The new best-and-brightest are like
McNamara in this respect too: their arrogance makes a mistake inconceivable.
It took an anti-war movement to provoke Daniel Ellsberg, one of the
original best-and-brightest, to finally break ranks and tell the truth. Another
movement and another Ellsberg are needed now, before the mistake becomes a
permanent one. “
TOM HAYDEN is the author of Ending the War in
Iraq [2008], the Tom Hayden Reader[2008] and this year’s The Long
Sixties.
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