Robert Mcnamara \"I Want Americans to Understand

Robert McNamara

"I want Americans to understand why we made the mistakes we did and to learn from them; that is the only way our nation can ever hope to leave the past behind" (McNamara, 1996)

Robert McNamara was the Secretary of Defense for the United States under presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, but he is best known in history for his role as one of the fiercest advocates of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war. This paper is in response to the video, "The Fog of War," in which McNamara discusses a number of issues that he faced during his tenure, and in hindsight he explains very candidly the errors in judgment and in strategy that were made in World War II and in the Vietnam war. This paper critiques his video and uses supplementary resources in the sense of providing perspective on the war the U.S. waged in Iraq.

Lesson Four -- Maximize Efficiency / Lesson Five -- Proportionality Guidelines

McNamara seems clearly disturbed in the video when he discusses the firebombing attacks on cities in Japan during the Pacific Theatre of World War II. He says the words, "One hundred thousand people burned to death" several times. He mentions that fifty square miles of Tokyo were torched in March, 1945. He goes on admit that he was "…part of the mechanism that… recommended [the firebombing]." He lays the ultimate responsibility on General Curtis LeMay, whose obsession was "target destruction." Men, women, and children were burned to death not just in Tokyo, but also -- as mentioned in Lesson Five -- there were 67 Japanese cities that were firebombed.

Was it maximizing efficiency to kill between half and ninety percent of the civilians in 67 Japanese cities, and then totally destroy Nagasaki and Hiroshima with atomic bombs? That is overkill, not maximizing efficiency. That is military revenge and vengeance through And as McNamara said in the video, the killing of civilians through this hideous, monstrous attack from the air was not proportional to the objectives that America was pursuing. McNamara makes the remarkable confession that those who ordered and carried out the bombings could have been tried as war criminals had the U.S. lost the war. That meant that McNamara too, was a "war criminal," he admitted.

As to the George W. Bush decision to invade and occupy Iraq, was it maximizing efficiency to spend trillions of dollars and kill an estimated 14,000 civilians and perhaps 130,000 insurgents and other hostiles in Iraq -- when the justification for the invasion was found to be based on lies and faulty intelligence? According to Spencer Ackerman in Wired magazine at least "132,000 civilians have died from 10 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a new study by Brown University" (Ackerman, 2011).

In the Guardian newspaper, civilian deaths were averaging 317 per day during the first weeks of the invasion in 2003, and of the 4,040 civilians that the coalition forces could specifically account for, 1,201 (29%) were children. By the time Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" on board an aircraft carrier, there were 7,286 civilian deaths (Guardian, 2008). The Brown University study also pegged the total dollar amount of the two wars at $4 trillion; of course this also includes the healthcare costs of the returning troops and other expenses. This is not maximizing efficiency in any sense of the word because the U.S. has left Iraq

But on the subject of maximizing efficiency, shortly after the 9/11 attacks on the United States, Bush declared a "war on terror" -- with near full support of the American people who were still in shock and angry at the terrorist attacks -- and invading Iraq was supposed to be an efficient way to defeat terrorism. He used as justification events that "…might have been purposefully exaggerated" (Serfaty, 2008). For example, the link that Bush and VP Cheney asserted existed between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda turned out to be false. The assertion that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and a nuclear program turned out to be false. The suspicion was (and is) that Bush and Cheney deliberately exaggerated and even deliberately falsified certain intelligence reports that would provide verification for their claims.

Bush should have learned from McNamara's mistakes in Vietnam. He should have learned from Lyndon Johnson's mistakes in getting the U.S. deeply into the Vietnam war; Johnson falsely claimed that the U.S. Navy had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin by North Vietnamese gunboats. He sold that story to the U.S. Senate and got the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution with only 2 Senators refusing to go along with it. That lie by Johnson cost 58,000 American lives in a war that was unwinnable and in fact was the only war America ever lost.

Also, Colin Powell's assertion that Saddam was building nuclear devices -- based on false reports that certain tubes and certain fissionable materials necessary for building a nuclear device were being purchased from Africa -- was absolutely bogus, it turned out. As to proportionality guidelines, what proportion of Secretary of State Colin Powell's report to the United Nations was known to be false and what proportion of his address was known to be true?