- Robert McNamara, who died yesterday, July 6, served as
Kennedy's , then as Johnson's defense secretary. He contributed more than
most to the slaughter of 3.4 million Vietnamese (his own estimate). He
went on to run the World Bank, where he presided over the impoverishment,
eviction from their lands and death of many millions more round the world.
-
- Just as George Kennan, one of the architects of the Cold
War, helped bolt together the ramshackle scaffolding of bogus claims that
provided the rationalization for Harry Truman's great "arms scare"
in 1948, launching the postwar arms race, McNamara tugged his forelock
and said "Aye, aye, Sir" when Kennedy, campaigning against Nxon
in the late 1950s attacked the Eisenhower/Nixon administration for having
allowed a "missile gap" to develop that had now delivered America
naked and helpless into the grip of the Soviet Union.
-
- This was the biggest lie in the history of threat inflation
and remains so to this day. At the moment when Kennedy, McNamara at his
elbow, was flaying the Eisenhower administration for the infamous "gap",
the U.S. government from its spy planes that the Soviet Union had precisely
one missile silo with an untested missile in it. The Russians knew that
the US knew this, because they were fully primed about about the U-2 spy-plane
overflights, most dramatically when U-2 pilot Gary Powers crashed near
Sverdlovsk and told all to his captors
-
- So when President Kennedy and Defense Secretary McNamara,
took power in 1961, became privy to all intelligence from the spy flights,
and announced that the U.S. was going to build 1000 ICBMs the Russians
concluded that the US planned to wipe out the Soviet Union and immediately
began a missile-building program of their own. So McNamara played a crucial,
enabling role in the arms race in nuclear missiles. Before the "missile
gap" it has been a "bomber race".
-
- It was entirely appropriate and logical that he began
his services to the military working in Japan as a civilian analyst for
Curt LeMay, the psychopathic Air Force general who ordered the raid that
produced the Tokyo firestorm and who went on to become head of the Strategic
Air Command and who boasted to Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis
that his missiles and B-52s were ready, willing and able to reduce the
Soviet Union to a "smoldering, irradiated ruin in three hours",
a deed he was eager to accomplish.
-
- LeMay was expert in guiding bright young systems analysts
like McNamara into giving him the ex post facto intellectual
rationales for enterprises on which he had long since set his mind. McNamara
was an early member of the "defense intellectuals", including
Roberta and Albert Wohlstetter and Herman Kahn, who developed the whole
argot of "controlled escalation", "nuclear exchanges"
and "mutual assured destruction" that kept the nuclear weapons
plants, aerospace factories and nuclear labs at Los Alamos and Livermore
and Oak Ridge humming along, decade after decade. McNamara liked to claim
later, as he did to Errol Morris, that it was he who advised LeMay to
send in his planes at lower altitude, the better to incinerate Japanese
cities, but the historical record does not give him this dignity. He was
a small player in LeMay's murderous game.
-
- He faded comfortably away. The last time we saw him vividly
was in 2004 as the star of Morris's wildly over-praised, documentary
The Fog of War, talking comfortably about the millions of people he's helped
to kill.
-
- Time and again, McNamara got away with it in that film,
cowering in the shadow of baroque monsters like LeMay or LBJ, choking up
about his choice of Kennedy's gravesite in Arlington, sniffling at the
memory of Johnson giving him the Medal of Freedom, spouting nonsense about
how Kennedy would have pulled out of Vietnam, muffling himself in the ever-
useful camouflage of the "fog of war."
-
- Now, the "fog of war" is a tag usually attributed
to von Clausewitz, though the great German philosopher and theorist of
war never actually used the phrase. Eugenia Kiesling argued a couple of
years ago in Military Review that the idea of fog--unreliable information--wasn't
a central preoccupation of Clausewitz. "Eliminating fog", Kiesling
wrote, "gives us a clearer and more useful understanding of Clausewitz's
friction. It restores uncertainty and the intangible stresses of military
command to their rightful centrality in 'On War'. It allows us to replace
the simplistic message that war intelligence is important with the reminder
that Clausewitz constantly emphasizes moral forces in war."
-
- As presented by McNamara, through Morris, "the fog
of war" usefully deflects attention from clear and unpleasant facts
entirely unobscured by fog. Roberta Wohlstetter was a pioneer in this fogging
technique back in the 1950s with her heavily subsidized Pearl Harbor:
Warning and Decision, which deployed the idea of distracting "noise"
as the phenomenon that prevented US commanders, ultimately Roosevelt, from
comprehending the information that the Japanese were about to launch a
surprise attack. Wohlstetterian "noise" thus obscured the fact
that FDR wanted a Japanese provocation, knew the attack was coming, though
not probably not its scale and destructiveness.
-
- When McNamara looked back down memory lane there were
no real shadows, just the sunlight of moral self-satisfaction: "I
don't fault Truman for dropping the bomb"; "I never saw Kennedy
more shocked" (after the murder of Ngo Dinh Diem); "never would
I have authorized an illegal action" (after the Tonkin Gulf fakery);
"I'm very proud of my accomplishments and I'm very sorry I made errors"
(his life). Slabs of instructive history, like "the missile gap",
were entirely missing from Morris's film. In his later years he offered
homilies about the menace of nuclear Armageddon, just like Kennan. It was
cost-free for both men to say to say such things, grazing peacefully on
the tranquil mountain pastures of their senior years. Why did they not
encourage weapons designers in Los Alamos to mutiny, to resign? Or say
that the atom spies in Los Alamos in the 1940s were right to try to level
nuclear terror to some sort of balance? Why did they not extol the Berrigans
and their comrades who served or are serving decades in prison for physically
attacking nuclear missiles, beating the decks of the Sea Wolf nuclear submarine
with their hammers.
-
- It's true that when he was head of the Ford Division
of the Ford Motor Company in the mid- 1950s, McNamara did push for safety
options--seat belts and padded instrument panels. Ford dealer brochures
for the '56 models featured photos of how Ford and GM models fared in actual
crashes, to GM's disadvantage. But as Ralph Nader describes it, in December,
1955, a top GM executive called Ford's vice president for sales and said
Ford's safety campaign had to stop. These Ford executives, many of them
formerly from GM, had a saying, Chevy could drop its price $25 to bankrupt
Chrysler, $50 to bankrupt Ford. Ford ran up the white flag. The safety
sales campaign stopped. McNamara took a long vacation in Florida, his career
in Detroit in the balance, and came back a team player. Safety went through
the windscreen and lay in a coma for years.
-
- McNamara had very dirty hands, however hard he and admirers
like Morris scrubbed them. Why did Defense Secretary McNamara overrule
all expert review and procurement recommendations and insist that General
Dynamics rather than Boeing make the disastrous F-111, at that time one
of the largest procurement contracts in the Pentagon's history? Could it
be that Henry Crown of Chicago was calling in some chits for his role in
fixing the 1960 JFK vote in Cook County, Illinois? Crown, of Chicago Sand
and Gravel, had $300 million of the mob's money in GD debentures, and after
the disaster of the Convair, GD needed the F-111 to avoid going belly-
up, taking the mob's $300 million with it. McNamara misled Congressional
investigators about this for years afterward.
-
- To interviewers McNamara paid great stress on JFK's "shock",
just a few weeks before he himself was killed, at the assassination of
South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother. He also promoted the view
that Kennedy was planning to withdraw from Vietnam. He oversaw the fakery
of the Gulf of Tonkin "attack" that prompted the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution in 1964, whereby Congress gave LBJ legal authority to prosecute
and escalate the war in Vietnam. He was a career "front man"
for the Kennedys, called even to Chappaquiddick to help Ted Kennedy figure
out what to say about it.
-
- The Six Day War? Just before this '67 war the Israelis
were ready to attack and knew they were going to win but couldn't get a
clear go- ahead from the Johnson Administration. As the BBC documentary
The 50 Years War narrates, Meir Amit, head of Israel's Mossad, flew to
Washington. The crucial OK came from McNamara, thus launching Israel's
long-planned, aggressive war on Egypt, Jordan and Syria, which led to present
disasters. It was McNamara, after Israel's deliberate attack on the US
ship Liberty during that war (with thirty-four US sailors dead and 174
wounded), who supervised the cover- up.
-
- McNamara had a 13-year stint running the World Bank,
whither he was dispatched by LBJ, Medal of Freedom in hand. McNamara liked
to brandish his Bank years as his moral redemption and all too often his
claim is accepted by those who have no knowledge of the actual, ghastly
record. In fact the McNamara of the World Bank evolved naturally, organically,
from the McNamara of Vietnam. The one was prolegomenon to the other, the
McNamara-sponsored horrors in Vietnam perhaps on a narrower and more vivid
scale, but ultimately lesser in dimension and consequence. No worthwhile
portrayal of McNamara could possibly avoid McNamara's performance at the
World Bank because there, within the overall constraints of the capitalist
system he served, he was his own man. There was no LeMay, no LBJ issuing
orders. And as his own man, McNamara amplified the ghastly blunders, corruptions
and lethal cruelties of American power as inflicted upon Vietnam to a planetary
scale. The best terse account of the McNamara years is in Bruce Rich's
excellent history of the Bank, Mortgaging the Earth, published in 1994.
-
- When McNamara took over the Bank, "development"
loans (which were already outstripped by repayments) stood at $953 million
and when he left, at $12.4 billion, which, discounting inflation, amounted
to slightly more than a 6- fold increase. Just as he multiplied the troops
in Vietnam, he ballooned the Bank's staff from 1,574 to 5,201. The Bank's
shadow lengthened steadily over the Third World. Forests, in the Amazon,
in Cameroon, in Malaysia, in Thailand, fell under the axe of "modernization".
Peasants were forced from their lands. Dictators like Pinochet and Ceausescu
were nourished with loans.
-
- From Vietnam to the planet: The language of American
idealism and high purpose was just the same. McNamara blared his mission
of high purpose in 1973 in Nairobi, initiating the World Bank's crusade
on poverty. "The powerful have a moral obligation to assist the poor
and the weak." The result was disaster, draped, as in Vietnam with
obsessive secrecy, empty claims of success and mostly successful efforts
to extinguish internal dissent. And as with Vietnam, McNamara's obsession
with statistics, produced a situation, (according to S. Shaheed Husain,
then the Bank's vice president in charge of Operations) where, "without
knowing it, McNamara manufactured data. If there was a gap in the numbers,
he would ask staff to fill it, and others made it up for him."
-
- At McNamara's direction the Bank would prepare five year
"master country lending plans", set forth in "country programming
papers. "In some cases, Rich writes, "even ministers of a nation's
cabinet could not obtain access to these documents, which in smaller, poor
countries, were viewed as international decrees on their economic fate."
-
- These same "decrees" were drawn up by technocrats
(in Vietnam they were the "advisers") often on the basis of a
few short weeks in the target country. Corruption seethed. Most aid vanished
into the hands of local elites who very often used the money to steal the
resources--pasture, forest, water, of the very poor whom the Bank was professedly
seeking to help. In Vietnam, Agent Orange and napalm.
-
- Across the third world, the Bank underwrote "Green
Revolution" technologies that the poorest peasants couldn't afford
and that drenched land in pesticides and fertilizer. Vast infrastructural
projects such as dams and kindred irrigation projects once again drove
the poor from their lands, from in Brazil to India. It was the malign parable
of "modernization" written across the face of the third world,
with one catatrophe after another catastrophes prompted by the destruction
of traditional subsistence rural economies.
-
- The appropriation of smaller farms and common areas,
Rich aptly comments, "resembled in some respects the enclosure of
open lands in Britain prior to the Industrial Revolution--only this time
on a global scale, intensified by Green Revolution agricultural technology."
As an agent of methodical planetary destruction, McNamara should be ranked
in the top tier of earth-wreckers of all time.
-
- "Management", McNamara declared in 1967 "is
the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed
change in every direction, is diffused through society." The managerial
ideal for McNamara was managerial dictatorship. World Bank loans surged
to Pinochet's Chile after Allende's overthrow, to Uruguay, to Argentina,
to Brazil after the military coup, to the Philippines, to Suharto after
the '65 coup in Indonesia.
-
- And to the Romania of Ceausescu. McNamara poured money--$2.36
billion between 1974 and 1982--into the tyrant's hands. In 1980 Romania
was the Bank's eighth biggest borrower. As McNamara crowed delightedly
about his "faith in the financial morality of socialist countries"
Ceausescu razed whole villages, turned hundreds of square miles of prime
farm land into open- pit mines, polluted the air with coal and lignite,
turned Rumania into one vast prison, applauded by the Bank in an amazing
1979 economic study as being a fine advertisement for the "Importance
of Centralized Economic Control". Another section of that same 1979
report, titled "Development of Human Resources", featured these
chilling words: "To improve the standards of living of the population
as a beneficiary of the development process, the government has pursued
policies to make better use of the population as a factor of production...
An essential feature of the overall manpower policy has been ... to stimulate
an increase in birth rates." Ceausescu forbade abortions, and cut
off disrtribution of contraceptives. Result: ten of thousand of abandoned
children, dumped in orphanages, another sacrificial hecatomb in McNamara's
lethal hubris.
-
- In his later years, McNamara never offered any reflection
on the social system that produced and promoted him, a perfectly nice,
well- spoken war criminal. As his inflation of his role in the foe- bombing
of Japan showed, he could go so far as to falsely though complacently indict
himself, while still shirking bigger, more terrifying and certainly more
useful reflections on the system that blessed him and mercilessly killed
millions upon millions under FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon.
-
- Like Speer, he got away with it, never having to hang
his head or drop through a trap door with a rope around his neck, as he
richly deserved.
-
- http://counterpunch.com/cockburn07072009.html
|