Robert McNamara Is Dead but His Sick Legacy Lives On

I see that tired old fool Robert McNamara is dead, McNamara for the 90% of the population that rightly and justly doesn’t know or care who about his memory was Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War.
McNamara revealed himself to be a hypocrite, a fool and perhaps even a fraud by his behavior during the war. During the Vietnam War McNamara blindly and enthusiastically supported the war effort. The war effort involved sending several hundred thousand American troops to Vietnam getting 60,000 of them killed for no apparent reason and wasting untold billions of the American taxpayers’ hard earned dollars on a battle that McNamara himself admitted was senseless. To make matters worse McNamara’s war effort involved massive bombings that killed or injured tens of thousands of innocent Vietnamese people, the people we were supposedly fighting the war to protect.
The worst part of the war was that we fought the Vietnam War to stop the spread of Communism. Yet it ended with Communist occupation of South Vietnam the murder of tens of thousands of innocent Vietnamese and hundreds of thousands of Cambodians by Communist thugs not to mention the exile of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese citizens who simply wanted to live their lives for something other than the glory of the Communist Party.
The saddest aspect of the story was that the US could have ended the Vietnam War in a few days by simply occupying North Vietnam. After the tremendous victory over Communist forces by US forces in the Tet Offensive in 1968 the US military could have quickly overrun North Vietnam forced Ho Chi Minh and his followers into exile and ended the war. Media coverage of the North Vietnamese Communist Party’s torture chambers, concentration camps and atrocities would have given the US a huge propaganda victory over Communism in the Cold War. A US victory in Vietnam would have also shown up the Soviet Union and the mighty Red Army for the paper tigers they really were, all the Kremlin could have done in the face of a US invasion of North Vietnam was to print a few editorials in Pravda condemning American Imperialism.
Or had McNamara if he had imagination and courage could have urged his boss LBJ to adopt the simple and effective strategy that Ronald Reagan used to win the Cold War without a single American coming home in a body bag. All the American soldiers and weaponry wasted in Vietnam could have been shipped to Europe to face the Red Army in Germany. The Kremlin would have had to respond in kind with massive military deployments of its own. Such an arms build up would have quickly bankrupted the Soviet Union and caused its collapse a decade or two earlier. I might also add that under such a strategy, the Americans killed or wounded in Vietnam would have enjoyed a pleasant interlude of drinking German beer and chasing Frauliens rather than hell in the jungle. As for Vietnam well, history demonstrated the minute the gravy train from Moscow was cut off the Vietnamese Communist Party couldn’t adopt capitalism or become or friend fast enough. This would have occurred with or without the Vietnam War or the 60,000 American deaths there.
McNamara of course admitted none of his mistakes. After leaving office, he began parroting the Liberal Establishment Party Line that the Vietnamese Communists were patriots fighting for their country and not thugs out to establish a vicious dictatorship. For this behavior McNamara was hailed as a great man by liberals who had denounced him as a baby killer a decade before.
McNamara at the end of the day was like almost all liberal elitists a hollow man with no real imagination or character a shallow fool who let The New York Times editorial page do his thinking for him. Like most of his ilk McNamara was betrayed and mistreated by the liberals yet he kept coming back to them at the end of the day because he had nothing. No imagination, no values, no loyalty just a desire for fame and power that ultimately destroyed him.
Of course the real danger from McNamara is that there are thousands of would be McNamaras in Washington right now ready to implement any imbecilic strategy or plan in exchange for a big office and a few minutes of media coverage every week. The solution to the problem of Robert McNamara then is not to condemn the memory of a pathetic dead man but to put an end to the monstrous system that put Robert McNamara in power, allowed him to destroy countless lives for no reason, rewarded him for his incompetence and honored him for his stupidity. Until that happens we’ll see an unending stream of McNamaras in Washington and a growing number of Americans coming home in body bags.