Of Morality, Winners And War Crimes: Robert McNamara On America’s Wars
A primary lesson from McNamara’s tenure is that wars escalate into catastrophes when adversaries fail to understand each other's history, fears, and motivations
“If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”
Robert McNamara, Vietnam War history, The Fog of War documentary, David Halberstam, American foreign policy, Cuban Missile Crisis, war crimes, World Bank President, World War II firebombing, Cold War history
Ahmad Faruqui
“If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”
(General Curtis LeMay)
“But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”
(Robert McNamara)
McNamara was America’s defence secretary under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He gained notoriety during the Vietnam War. He had served under LeMay in the Army Air Corps during the Second World War. But that was not why Kennedy appointed him as his defence secretary. It was the turnaround he had engineered at Ford Motor Corporation, using systems analysis, a data-based methodology that he had learned at Harvard Business School.
From 1961-68, McNamara oversaw the military’s involvement during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War. By the time 1968 arrived, McNamara had concluded the Vietnam War was unwinnable and had begun to openly disagree with Johnson.
Johnson pushed him out politely and nominated him to serve as the President of the World Bank, which he did for 11 years. A man who had ordered the killing of millions of Vietnamese was now given the job of saving the lives of billions around the globe. There was more than a little irony in appointing the architect of the Vietnam War as the head of the World Bank. History repeated itself in 2005 when President George W Bush appointed Paul Wolfowitz, the lead architect of the Iraq War, as the head of the World Bank.
But his role in that war continued to haunt him. Two decades after the Vietnam war ended, he penned In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam.
In July 2001, just two months prior to 9/11, I saw McNamara sitting on the podium along with others such as Secretary George Schultz at a book launch event featuring Henry Kissinger. McNamara listened as Kissinger spoke of American exceptionalism and denied any involvement in the coup that deposed Chile’s government. He did not say a word. He was similarly silent when the US launched its first war on terror in October 2001 in Afghanistan.
In 2003, the US launched its second war on terror in Iraq. Coincidentally, that’s when McNamara’s documentary, The Fog of War, was released. I saw it at a theatre in Berkeley soon after it came out.
He noted that any military commander who is honest with himself will admit that he has made mistakes in the application of military power. “He's killed people unnecessarily — his own troops or other troops — through mistakes, through errors of judgment. A hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands, maybe even a hundred thousand.”
He said wars often break out because enemies do not empathise with each other. And they fail because both sides think rationality will prevail. Referring to the Cuban missile crisis in the early sixties between the US and the USSR, he says that “Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational.” Yet these rational individuals came very close to destroying their nations.
To him, the major lesson of the Cuban missile crisis was that “The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations.” He asked if it was “right and proper that today there are 7,500 strategic offensive nuclear warheads, of which 2,500 are on 15-minute alert, to be launched by the decision of one human being?”
Referring to the Second World War, McNamara was on the island of Guam in March 1945. “In that single night, we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo: men, women, and children. 50 square miles of Tokyo, the size of New York City, were burned.” He went on to add that it was not just Tokyo which was firebombed. So was 58% of Yokohama, roughly the size of Cleveland, 99% of Toyama, the size of Chattanooga, and 40% of Nagoya, the size of Los Angeles. This was all done before the dropping of the nuclear bombs in August 1945.
He says that proportionality should be used as a guideline in war. Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs was not proportional to the objectives the US was trying to achieve. Even LeMay admitted later, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” LeMay recognised that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. McNamara ruminates: “But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” That is a searing indictment of his role in America’s war, but the admission is made without a hint of remorse.
Turning to the beginnings of the Vietnam War, he says when President Johnson heard that US boats and destroyers were being attacked, he ordered the bombing of targets in North Vietnam. Johnson said he would not do it without Congressional authority. He put forward a resolution, the language of which gave complete authority to the President to take the nation to war. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution passed and the war commenced.
McNamara says that the decision to bomb North Vietnam was both right and wrong. Again, no remorse or regret. This is yet another case of seeing only what we want to believe.
As the bombardment began, Johnson, with all the gusto of a Texan cowboy, was ebullient, saying that America always wins the wars that she undertakes. And, of course, he gave himself some moral cover by saying the US had declared war on “tyranny and aggression. If this little nation goes down the drain and can't maintain her independence, ask yourself what's going to happen to all these other little nations.”
McNamara says that in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US was able to see the conflict from the Soviet standpoint and war was avoided. Of course, the fear of triggering a nuclear war may have been the primary reason for avoiding war.
He admits that the US failed to see the conflict from the viewpoint of the North Vietnamese and justifies is by saying that we didn't know them well enough to empathise. At some point during the war, he had an epiphany. He said they saw the US yet another colonial power like France and thought we were seeking to subject South and North Vietnam to our colonial interests. As for the US, “We saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War”.
In 1995, he met a former Foreign Minister of Vietnam. The conversation was brutal and McNamara says, “we almost came to blows.”
The Vietnamese said: “You’re totally wrong. We were fighting for our independence. You were fighting to enslave us.” He lashed out at McNamara for not regarding the killing of 3,400,000 Vietnamese a tragedy. It would be equivalent to 27 million Americans on a proportionate basis. In reality, only 58,000 Americans were killed. He said the US failed to get anything more than what the Vietnamese were willing to give the US at the beginning of the war: “You could have had the whole damn thing: independence, unification”.
Then he lost his temper: “Mr McNamara, you must never have read a history book. If you had, you’d have know we weren’t pawns of the Chinese or the Russians. McNamara, didn't you know that? Don’t you understand that we have been fighting the Chinese for 1,000 years? We were fighting for our independence. And we would fight to the last man. And we were determined to do so. And no amount of bombing, no amount of US pressure would ever have stopped us.”
McNamara said he continues to believe that sometimes a nation must engage in evil acts to preserve its ideals. But it should do everything to minimise evil. McNamara tried to defend General LeMay, who was head of the US Air Force during McNamara’s tenure as Defense Secretary: “He was trying to save the country. And in the process, he was prepared to do whatever killing was necessary.”
Then came McNamara’s confession: “We all make mistakes. I don't know any military commander, who is honest, who would say he has not made a mistake…Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.” But he did not say that commanders who make the mistake should suffer the consequences.
Later, he said that the US is the most powerful nation in the world. “If we cannot persuade other nations with similar interests and similar values of the merits of the proposed use of that power, we should not proceed unilaterally except in the unlikely requirement to defend directly the continental US, Alaska and Hawaii.”
He did not believe that the US should apply its economic, political, and military power unilaterally. “If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn’t have been there. None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can’t persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we’d better reexamine our reasoning.” Of course, the US continues to make that mistake repeatedly.
McNamara admitted that the US had failed in its responsibility to its own poor and to the billions of poor people around the globe by failing to advance their nutrition, literacy, health and employment.
And then came his ultimate statement: “War is a blunt instrument by which to settle disputes between or within nations, and economic sanctions are rarely effective.” He called upon the US to “build a system of jurisprudence based on the International Court—that the US has refused to support—which would hold individuals responsible for crimes against humanity.”
In the epilogue to the documentary, a testy exchange takes place between Errol Morris (ER), who interviews him, and McNamara:
EM: After you left the Johnson administration, why didn't you speak out against the Vietnam War?
McNamara: I'm not going to say any more than I have. These are the kinds of questions that get me in trouble. You don't know what I know about how inflammatory my words can appear. A lot of people misunderstand the war, misunderstand me. A lot of people think I'm a son of a bitch.
EM: Do you feel in any way responsible for the War? Do you feel guilty?
McNamara: I don't want to go any further with this discussion. It just opens up more controversy. I don't want to add anything to Vietnam. It is so complex that anything I say will require additions and qualifications.
EM: Is it the feeling that you're damned if you do, and if you don't, no matter what?
McNamara: Yeah, that's right. And I'd rather be damned if I don't.
McNamara died in 2009, at the age of 93. History has not been kind to him. The war correspondent and journalist David Halberstam, wrote a book about the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest in which he describes McNamara as a “whiz kid” in the Kennedy administration. Reviewing this role in the Vietnam War, he delivered a scathing assessment: “He was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool.”
Halberstam argued that McNamara's primary loyalty was to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson rather than to the truth. He accused McNamara of allowing subordinates to mislead the public and failing to confront his superiors with unpleasant realities. That would suggest he had no moral conscience.
He believed McNamara’s reliance on quantifiable data and statistical models led him to dangerously misjudge the political and historical realities of the war. One might say he suffered from strategic myopia by only focusing on what could be quantified.
Halberstam was unimpressed when McNamara later admitted to his errors in his 1995 memoir In Retrospect. In a 1979 letter to The New York Times, Halberstam criticised McNamara's time at the World Bank as a form of “penance,” arguing that McNamara had ill-served the nation by failing to stop the war even after he had concluded it was failing.