January 28, 2004
McNamara On Iraq
Tristero finds an interview with Robert McNamara who now believes that it is important to speak out on the mistakes being made in Iraq. McNamara pointed to 11 critical mistakes we made in Vietnam, and now he is seeing these same mistakes played out today.
Posted by Mary at January 28, 2004 12:41 AM | TrackBackIn 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.
The only thing that's wrong here, is that the war in Iraq is not over, while Vietnam has been for over 25 years.
It is too soon for anyone to claim this a failure.
The amount of US troops killed in Iraq war (still on going); 500+
The amount of US soldiers killed in Vietnam; 58,000.
This war in Iraq is not comparable to Vietnam in many more ways than it is similiar.
Another thing that this war is incomparable to Vietnam, is that this war has been only going since March 2003.
Vietnam US invovlement was from 1964 to about 1975(over 10 years)
No matter how you try to fry it and sell it, this war in Iraq is not anything like Vietnam.
I wish people would use another example...This Vietnam comparison is trite.
For anyone wanting to know more about McNamara and his involvelment in the Vietnam War, click on my name for the site, it's a good read.
-In our war with North Vietnam, a patriotic U.S. government might have issued statements to both China and the USSR that this country would brook no interference from either of them, and there is every reason to assume that they would have backed down. But McNamara holds that he feared war with the Soviets and the Chinese and for that reason limited the air campaign over Vietnam.
Few Americans at that time understood just how heavy the shackles were on the courageous men who piloted American planes over the North. In his superb essay on the war, The Tragedy of Southeast Asia (THE NEW AMERICAN, February 1, 1988), Vietnam veteran R.D. Patrick Mahoney writes that in the air war over North Vietnam, American pilots were heavily restricted by an ever-changing series of complex rules, set in place by Washington politicians. Among the many outrageous and ridiculous restrictions were these:
• SAM missile sites could not be bombed while they were under construction and while they remained relatively harmless to our planes. They could be bombed only after they became operational and therefore lethally dangerous.
• Pilots were not permitted to attack communist MIGs parked on enemy runways. They could only be attacked after they were in the air, had been carefully identified, and had shown hostile intentions. Even then, enemy air bases could not be attacked.
• U.S. pilots could not attack enemy military truck depots located more than 200 yards from a road. Trucks traveling on roads could be attacked, but the moment they left the roadway it was forbidden for American pilots to molest them in any way.
• Enemy troops could not be bombed unless a South Vietnamese forward air controller was with attacking aircraft. This was true even if communist troops were clearly visible and were being pointed at by an officer on the ground.
The U.S. was set up to lose that war, McNamara orchestrated it so.
(click my name below for the full article) to see what kind of man McNamara was.
Posted by: Hanging Chad on January 28, 2004 03:03 AMoops!
clicking my name should work for that site now (until I figure out how to post a URL, there are no directions...)
Posted by: Hanging Chad on January 28, 2004 03:11 AMThis should work now.
McNamara's role in the Vietnam War
No matter how you try to fry it and sell it, this war in Iraq is not anything like Vietnam.
Chad, out of respect for your efforts to propagate the article, I went and read it, and I have to say I'm deeply disappointed that anyone is still trying to make arguments like these. This represents the worst sort of macho posturing I remember from growing up with adherents of the John Birch Society. It would be really important to remember that the Vietamese Civil War was something inflicted on the Vietnames by a large number of mutually indifferent state actors; blaming McNamara and "lifelong liberals" for the entire failure in Vietnam is a regurgitation of the most absurd conspiracy theories I've ever heard.
As it happens, I've read a lot of books on military history--not that I'm claiming to be an expert, by any stretch of the imagination--and many of those include books by military men on combat in Vietnam. I'm referring to commanders at military colleges who did not hesitate to rebuke erroroneous decisions in the war. And no reputable expert has ever sustained a shadow of the slanders in that meritritious article.
What is exceptionally common is for commanders to criticize each other--the leadership of war is an exceptionally political act, involving costs measured in deaths, and consequences measured in social potential.
The author takes McNamara's remark "War is waste and the preparation for war is waste" (1965) as evidence of treason. Can there be any association more fanatical, more meritricious than this?
Posted by: James R MacLean on January 29, 2004 05:12 AMThe thing to remember about the War in Vietnam was that it was always on the verge of ending according to official sources. But, somehow, the deadline date just kept being pushed back, more and more, and the death toll kept rising. As I write this, so far 526 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, another 21 have killed themselves, and various mem bers of the news media have been killed, along with civilian contractors. One can hope that the death toll will stop, but it makes more sense to support candidates and organizations that will work to stop it. We have to ask basic questions: if our goals in Iraq are so important to justify the killing of 526 of our soldiers, are they important enough to justify the killing of 5,260? Or 52,600? If it is important for us to be in Iraq in February, 2004, will it be important next year? The year after next? In five years? In ten years? In other words, we have to set limits on the losses of lives and money we are incurring.
Posted by: Rep. Mark B. Cohen on February 3, 2004 01:35 AMRep. Cohen is burning the midnight oil ;) Who says public servants don't take their jobs seriously?
Posted by: natasha on February 3, 2004 05:03 AMI knew I had seen a reference about the problems of comparing the 58,000 Vietnam dead to the Iraq dead -- and it appears we are in a LOT worse shape than we were in Vietnam if you look at the war's timeline. (The following is thanks to a comment James R MacLean left on an earlier post.)
Reuters: US War Dead in Iraq Exceeds Early Vietnam Years
...A Reuters analysis of Defense Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on Dec. 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
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And please don't forget that one of the reasons this war is worse again is many, many of the wounded today would have been dead in the 1960's and 1970's simply because the survival rate for extremely bad injuries is much higher now. So forget about this war being not as bad as Vietnam. There is lots of time to see it get worse - much, much worse than Vietnam. The trend lines are very bad.
a href="http://www.aei.org/include/news_print.asp?newsID=19819">Pre-emptive strike is effective tool
Posted by: Hanging Chad on February 5, 2004 11:20 PMPre-emptive strike is effective tool
Posted by: on February 5, 2004 11:20 PM