“War is more delightful to those who have never experienced it”
                                                                     - Erasmus

Robert McNamara, the chief architect of the United States’ participation in the Vietnam conflict, died this past week.  He was 93 years old.  In addition to serving as both Kennedy’s and Johnson’s Secretary of Defense, McNamara headed Ford Motor Company and served as the President of The World Bank from 1968-1981.

Possibly no one in history has ever been more reviled on both the Left and the Right than was McNamara.  The Left saw him as the primary force that sent thousands of young men to their deaths in a useless, illegal and morally unjust war.  The Right saw him as someone forcing the U.S. to fight the Vietnam War with one hand tied behind our back by prosecuting the war while trying to avoid a full-scale escalation that might have evoked another all out conflict with China less than 25 years after the Korean conflict.

McNamara’s most lasting legacy, and his most egregious sin, though, was the precedent he set with Vietnam that paved the way for Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rove, Libby  and other war-mongers of the Bush administration to consign thousands of more Americans to early graves with the debacles they propagated in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Long after the victims of Vietnam were either in their graves, wandering aimlessly and drunk on America’s streets or struggling with the horrors of post traumatic stress disorder, McNamara admitted he had been “wrong, terribly wrong” about the war.   I felt nothing but abject disdain for his all too public attempt at redemption.  Were he a leader of a weaker, less influential nation, his policies and actions would have led to war crimes prosecution.  And it is to our detriment that such prosecution did not occur.  For, if it had, the cronies of Bush and Cheney would have, undoubtedly, been less eager to follow the same yellow brick road.

McNamara shipped off to Vietnam in droves youngsters from 18 to 22.  Far too many died there; even more come back forever scarred.  Our leaders should have been looking out for those of us who were caught in this Faustian net.  We knew nothing about geopolitics, or why we were being turned into trained killers.  We were taught the enemy was nothing more than just another target, just like on the rifle range, and that, after killing one, we were to just look for the next “target.” 

The reality was not that easy.  Many would end up weeping on the battlefield, crying for moms with their dying breaths.  Or trembling uncontrollably as we watched buddies, covered in filth, bleed to death before our eyes — sometimes in our arms.  When we came face-to-face with the result of our own taking of a human life, no amount of indoctrination into how we were “making the world safe for democracy” could assuage the horror, the guilt and the anger over what we had done.

The universal truth is that people in power refuse to understand that, as Bob Herbert wrote, “wars are unrelentingly hideous enterprises, that they butcher people without mercy and therefore should be undertaken only when absolutely necessary.”  Instead, our leaders have a penchant for seeking to advance their careers and their legacies by sacrificing the lives of the young while they engage in hollow, flag-waving, risk-free expressions of patriotic fervor.

Congress authorized the Vietnam War after President Johnson contended that American warships had been attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964, an attack that never happened.  Congress funded our invasion of Iraq after Bush asserted that Saddam Hussein possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, weapons that did not exist.  Yet we still fall prey to the lies of our leaders.

Robert McNamara taught this country all we need to know about the folly of ill-conceived military actions.  The problem is that no one listened.