TheMillerCircle.org

The recent death of Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, and early architect of the Vietnam War, provided us with an opportunity to more seriously address what,  for America, is the equivalent of the big bang theory–how we got to where we are today? Until the close of WW II, we were a non-militarized country, so the America we have today is historically a brand new iteration of itself. McNamara, in his book and in the documentary made of it–The Fog of War, dealt with Vietnam as a bad war, a unnecessary choice, and an unwinnable conflict. The war itself destroyed Johnson’s Presidency and revived Nixon’s political career, such that, once elected to the Presidency,  Nixon and Kissinger pursued an expanded war into Cambodia and Laos, with an ultimate disastrous consequence for the future of all those living in Cambodia (Pol Pot’s  Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979; 1.5 million deaths) and a death toll of 4.5 million in North and South Vietnam (not including war year deaths in Cambodia and Laos), including nearly 60,000 Americans killed during the conflict (more if you included the 1.7 x the rate of civilian suicides committed by soldiers who had served in the Vietnam War).

McNamara’s conclusion about the ill-conceived nature of the war drew strong criticism from the war supporters who felt betrayed by the very man that had led them into the conflict and significantly escalated the war, but also the man who couldn’t finish the job (LBJ fired him, but made it look like a job transfer to the World Bank). Revisionists want to argue, as McNamara did on some occasions, that it was not so much whether the Vietnam War was a wrong war, but whether the manner in which it was pursued was too costly to American and Vietnamese lives–a good example of bad American efficiency (there weren’t enough My Lia’s). Could the war have been won with a better military strategy? Did the liberal cowards on the home front quit on the war too early? The cowardice-at-home theory is alive and well, recently revived by the Swift Boaters of America, as they accused John Kerry of not deserving the title of war hero.  After all, McNamara was not a military strategist, though he hired a few who couldn’t possibly bring a military victory to his table. No one could. We were fighting intense nationalism, not an ideology and that makes all the difference in the world. To his death, McNamara was conflicted by not asking one simple question about the Vietnam War (see below).

In all of the discussions I have heard recently, springing up from news of McNamara’s  death, not once did I hear a thoughtful comment or a deeper probing question, one that should be on the minds of all Americans, as they ponder their perpetual wars of ignominious choices, such as those in Korea and Vietnam, but particularly the Vietnam War. The missing question is this: if the Vietnam War was a bad war, a mistaken war, an act of selecting a false enemy, didn’t that mean we should be examining whether or not the Cold War, Vietnam’s  predecessor and master guidance system, was also based on a false notion, a bad ideology, one that didn’t correctly identify the real world?  If Vietnam was the wrong war, wasn’t Korea another wrong war? And, if Korea was a wrong war, wasn’t the Cold War itself a bad choice to make, derived from a wrongful view of the world? This seems to be a hard question for Americans to address, because if the Cold War wasn’t necessary or was another bad war, it meant that America probably didn’t have any real enemies at the close of WW II–we created them. Without our fictitious enemies, we could have torn down the Pentagon as scheduled (it was made of non-reinforced concrete to conduct WW II and was scheduled to be torn down as America was supposed to demilitarize) and managed to get on making a truly better world, not the one we have now. As Geoffrey Perret points out in his insightful book “Commander-in-Chief: How Truman, Johnson and Bush Turned a Presidential Power into a Threat to America’s Future,” the sudden death of FDR in 1945 put Truman in the vortex of decision making in which he innately took a hard right turn, primarily because he didn’t like the Russians and he would, in a few months, have “the bomb.” Truman also loved the military and military power. He also, according to historian Perret,  used drugs to help affirm his decision-making. FDR was not going to allow the French to go back into Vietnam, but when the French argued with the Truman administration that they would re-enter Vietnam to help fight communism, the switch was turned on and all of America’s light bulbs supporting the Cold War went into an “ON-STATE” where they remain to this day, even though communism is not perceived to be a threat, unless you count Cuba and North Vietnam.  A few strokes of Truman’s pen made it impossible for those that would follow to see the world through a proper pair of spectacles–Ho Chi Min was not a communist– he was a nationalist who wanted to unite his country and throw out the French: initially, he thought Truman might help, but his letters to Truman, drawing from Thomas Jefferson’s writing in the Declaration of Independence, went unanswered and unheeded.

Although China did not initially fit into the anti-communist conspiracy theory sparked by Truman, the fall of China in 1949 to the communists under Mao Zedong sparked a new wave of American paranoia about the magnitude of the communist threat. Some of you may remember the domestic search under the banner of McCarthyism for “who lost China? We errantly concluded that China and Russia together constituted a unified threat to us wee little capitalists. But Mao’s Zedong’s choice of ideologies was driven by his strategic desire to restore China as a great and independent power. Although he didn’t live to see it, the American economy made sure his vision would be implemented, as we sacrificed our own sense of economic security, based on a broad manufacturing economy,  so that China could gain as an economic power through manufacturing, as we converted our economy to a financial service sector, in order to bring down the economies of the world through selective acts of stupidity and excessive financial hubris. Cold War America was replaced by greed America.

Under Harry Truman America began its slide down the slippery slope of the military-industrial complex and acquired the DNA of thinking about the globe in terms of military conflicts: after all, the world was easy to understand, as it had been divided in two. Thus began our contiguous acts of Folly Compounding and the American version of “The Never-Ending Story.” We still can’t shake the missiles, the nuclear warheads, missile defense, cluster bombs, jet fighters with no application and drones that don’t mind killing dozens of civilians if they can also get at least one Taliban. So, because we didn’t ever understand Ho Chi Minh or Mao Zedong, it is impossible to understand the Taliban. Doesn’t it bother you today, as an American, that we never seem to ask the question: who are the Taliban? How did they come into existence? Why were there so few Taliban in Pakistan until we started bombing that country? This is how Americans have learned to avoid knowing anything about their own history–it has become part of the American DNA.

RFM