The Riddle of Robert McNamara

There's nothing worse than an incompetent control freak in a position of authority. Because for a large percentage of Americans, watching McNamara's conduct of the Vietnam War was like witnessing a slow motion train wreck. It was as if the man had studied every defeat in military history and was hellbent on incorporating them into our Vietnam strategy.

He was a loathsome figure - arrogant, incompetent and devoid of humanity. The best thing this man ever did in life was to leave it.

The last "Big Lie" of the McNamara administration continues to kill U.S. warriors. SEE: http://www.thebutter-cutter.com/Last_Big_Lie_Of_VNhtml.html

The Americans may have met their Ammageddon in Vietnam because of hubris and racism.They believed in the superiority of Am erican boys and the white race and they expected American troops to nail the coonskins to the wall to use LBJ's phrase.They underestimated the small yellow men of Vietnam, assuming wrongly that they weremotivated by communism when they were really motivated by patriotism. The Vietnamese won the battle and i hope the west shall think twice before it engages battle again with asiatic millions.

it is possible that America entered this war and lost more than 50,000 troops in the racist belief that white americans were a super race who would nail those coons to the wall. De Gaulle warned Kennedy not to engage his boys in an asian war since asiatic millions could absorb casualties which western societies could not tolerate. The Viet Cong were fired by patriotism but the Americans saw only communism.They wanted to reunite their country and thank God they succeeded.

McNamara, the once powerful State Secretary instrumental to the escalation of Vietnam War beyond common wisdom, did openly admit that the War was a ???terrible mistake???. He must have deeply regretted and been truly remorseful.

Would anyone in the Bush Administration do likewise about the Iraq War?

Or for that matter, will anyone in Washington say likewise about the Afghan War one day in the not so distant future?

Think about it. PLEASE.
(btt1943)

No riddle there - kids I went to school with graduated and within a year came home in aluminum coffins. A lot more were wounded really bad. Many of them were wounded so bad they're still living on the grounds of the VA. And what about all the Vietnamese who got killed and wounded? No riddle there. It's real simple.

I am not normally mean-spirited and seldom speak ill of the dead, but in McNamara's case, if he is slowly roasting in hell, I certainly won't shed a tear.

The real tragedy, however, is that Bush, Cheney, et al, didn't learn one damn thing from McNamara or LBJ's mistakes, so another generation of young Americans were sent off to war for all the wrong reasons.

Mr Thomas:

As usual, sadly, the title of the movie shows how "Bob" was once again wrong. While there is traditionally a fog of battle, there should be no fog of war: the warlord should have a clear-eyed view of his strategy/goals, unclouded by the smoke of an actual field of battle. Bob's problem was that he was a poor/losing strategist -- as so aptly/painfully shown in the movie and the book -- and, by his own admission in the movie, a war criminal for the fire-bombing of the Japanese cities.

Mr Thomas:

The title of the film says it all. Typical of "Bob", he got it wrong: There is a fog of battle -- literally, of course, in the past, tho' perhaps less so today -- but there should not be a fog of war, as the warlord should always be sufficiently removed from the battlefield and be sufficiently clear-eyed as a strategist to not feel that the strategy/objective of the war can be obscured by smoke.

I have, for more than 50 years, perceived Robert McNamara and his cohort LBJ as war criminals, but not for the same reasons that the vocal and visible protesters did. I too was a child of the 60's, but also an active duty Air Force Officer from early 1967 to late 1975. I watched and grieved as hundreds of my contemporaries died or were confined to the hell of North Vietnamese prisons as a direct result of the grand delusions of Johnson and McNamara that they could better manage the day to day conduct of the air war than the Generals. LBJ once boasted that, "Those boys can't hit an out house without my permission". Neither could they hit SAM sites under construction, North Vietnamese air fields, taxiing or parked MIGs, ground to air defensive sites in Hanoi or Haiphong, etc, etc, etc. To the decided advantage of the enemy, our strike aircraft could not vary their targets, ingress and egress routes or the timing of strikes from what was dictated by LBJ and Strange Bob. Today I and my contemporaries have closure. McNamara has faced Judgment, and LBJ is reunited in Hell with his old accomplice.

When McNamara returned from his "fact finding" tour in Vietnam in 1963, he was handed five leather bound copies of the report as his helicopter landed at the Pentagon, already proofed and ready to be delivered to Kennedy, as he immediately drove off to the White House. The reports had been completed before McNamara's return, most likely before he left for Vietnam and the trip was only for show. Kennedy smelled a rat and decided then and there to withdraw the 2500 "advisors" and close the books on Vietnam for good. McNamara's Defense Department had many billion dollar contracts in the wings for the escallation of the Vietnam War. This and the upcoming abolision of the FED were the last straws prior to JFK's assassination. http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/ This book, The Secret Team, The CIA And It's Allies In Control Of The United States And The World is now a free download on the Internet and covers this infamous segment of McNamara's job as Secretary of Defense.
John McCarthy
http://johnmccarthy90066.tripod.com/id48.html