Don't cry for Bob, yes, some called him Bob, McNamara because he lives on in the system that he served as Secretary of Defense during the Sixties. The policy elites who run our current wars and prepare for the next war are just as devoted as McNamara was to the technocratic mindset. Rumsfled was almost a clone of the business school mindset about war as was Bob. The arrogance that got us into Vietnam has gotten into Afghanistan and Iraq. McNamara lives in the Orwellian language of military intellectuals who speak of kinetic battlefields and full spectrum dominance. The use of a pseudo scientific language covers a multitude of sins of omission ie, the lack of historical and political understanding of peoples and cultures not akin to our own. We blundered into Vietnam because we did not listen to the French, did not understand the people we were about to fight and dismissed the few experts we had within our own government who warned against a ground war in Asia.
Bob McNamara lives on. Bob Gates is finding out how hard it is root out the interests that use the war machine as a means to fuel their state's economy and guarantee their reelections. The waste that McNamara tried to control is today impeding the country's recovery from the greatest economic collapse since the 1930's.
Bob McNamara lives.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
He also lives on in "Fog of War" (as well as in Iraq...his ghost is in Baghdad, Tikrit, Samarra...).
ReplyDeletesigned lmcd aka anonymous