The Fog Of Robert McNamara

[Vincent L. Guarisco]

By Danny Schechter

July 7, 2009

I was on the ferry some years ago from Woods Hole to
Martha's Vineyard and a friend motioned towards a certain spot in the
water.



"That's where they wanted to do it," I was told.



"Do what," I asked?



Throw Robert McNamara, then a summer resident on the Vineyard, off the ship and into the water.



They never did it.



In the minds of a generation, it was that genius
that convinced the country and his bosses, JFK and LBJ, that he/we
could win the Vietnam War.



Mac The Knife was a briefer's briefer, great at
pointing at maps, with all the self assurance of a former President at
the Ford Motor Company. He was the ultimate smartie. (Actually he would
have been pleased by what Obama did yesterday in Moscow in meeting with
the Ruskies about limiting nuclear weapons.)

He died at 93 early yesterday, and despite all of
his "good deeds" and stint at the World Bank, he would always be known
as the architect of the Vietnam War. His middle name was STRANGE,
Robert Strange McNamara.



Never mind it was Ho Chi Minh who launched the wars
of liberation after the American government turned down his bid for
help against the French and who patterned Viet Nam's Declaration of
Independence after our own . Ho died in 79 and is still revered for
reunifying his company and teaching various imperialists that his
country was not to be fucked with. (I visited the mausoleum in Hanoi
with "Uncle" Ho's remains. It was mobbed by a constant stream of
visitors. How many will visit Bob's grave site?)



McNamara returned to his Waterloo (Hanoi) some years
back for a conference on the "lessons of the war" with General Giap,
the winner, and several American Generals, the losers. He was
challenged by the feisty Vietnamese American documentary director,
Tiana [Thi Thanh Nga], who made "From Hollywood to Hanoi"
and other films for all the deaths he caused. There is precious footage
of him freaking out and arrogantly lecturing her. The Vietnamese
government was too diplomatic to express its rage.



In Vietnam, today they speak of the AMERICAN War, not the Vietnam War. If you missed it, you should see THE FOG OF WAR about McNamara's role in the war and his unwillingness to admit that it was a crime.



Brad Schreiber writes about the film on Huntington Post


McNamara's "lessons" in Fog of War take on a greater
significance when applied to the current military action in Iraq and
its corresponding connection to a Southeast Asian conflict that
resulted in more than 58,000 American and 3.4 million Vietnamese dead.
Morris feels the associations will be made and thus does not refer to
current geopolitics in the documentary: "... For me, the meaning of the
story is that when you have a predisposition to see something, you can
ignore endless evidence to the contrary. And you can even imagine
confirming evidence. That's the worst of it. It was in service of this
theme, believing is seeing, which as we all know has currency for our
particular time in history, because regardless of whether this is a
replay of Vietnam or something very different, there are identifiable
themes here.

David Halberstam: Dead Wrong a review of McNamara's book, IN RETROSPECT: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam [1995]



Robert McNamara says he miscalculated our chances in Vietnam, but what's not in his book is as telling as what is.



[snip]



In these surprisingly bloodless, carefully sanitized
pages, McNamara is like a player at the poker table who, when the game
is over still refuses to show his cards. The book is almost devoid of
mood, insight and spiritual texture. He does not reveal his own
feelings at that terrible moment in 1967 when he realized that his military calculations were wrong, that
thousands and thousands of Americans and Vietnamese were dying each
week and that, of all the things that he had done in a seemingly
admirable career, he would be remembered more than anything else for
Vietnam. This is not his way; there are no feelings here. We will never
even know if he has ever visited the Vietnam Memorial. READ FULL STORY HERE

Commentary: Galloway on McNamara: Reading an obit with great pleasure "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." -Clarence Darrow (1857–1938)


Well, the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has
finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of
Hell. McNamara was the original bean-counter - a man who knew the cost
of everything but the worth of nothing. READ FULL STORY HERE

Reprinted from News Dissector.com


Author's Bio: News Dissector Danny Schechter is blogger in chief at Mediachannel.Org He is the author of PLUNDER: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo Books) available at Amazon.com. See Newsdisssector.org/store.htm.

[She-Warrior]

Though I don't wish it for any man; their actions will have led to their reward Art. Excellent blog Vinc. Thanks for educating me in this.

[death_to_the_NWO]

May David cRockefeller, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, and a passel of other angry old men keep him company in hell as soon as God wills it.