Wharf../
the 'Cut' can't fail..
its true purpose is to payback the Bigs who Paid jr's way........
from Arbusto to the W. House
A long and winding road
T
Warning to Bush from contrite cold war veteran
Fiachra Gibbons, arts correspondent, in Cannes
Friday May 23, 2003
The Guardian
Robert McNamara, the US defence secretary during the Cuban missile crisis and the first phases of the Vietnam war, has warned of the folly of American involvement in Iraq.
Mr McNamara, a hate figure to the anti-war movement in the 1960s who rarely airs his views in public, delivered the shot across the bows of the Bush administration in the documentary The Fog of War, which has been premiered at the Cannes film festival.
"If we can't persuade our allies and other comparable nations, we had better examine our reasoning," he said in the documentary. "What makes us omniscient?"
To his critics, Mr McNamara was a cold war warrior, "an intercontinental ballistic missile machine on legs", an arrogant "automaton", a man often condemned as a warmonger who applied the cool corporate efficiency he had learnt running Ford to opposing the Soviets.
But the person that emerges from Errol Morris's film is a different character - reflective, emotional and contrite, constrained by duty and loyalty from speaking out. "A lot of people think I'm a son of a bitch," he admitted on film. "I have made mistakes. Every military commander will admit he has made mistakes, that he has killed people unnecessarily. Those that don't are lying."
But, he added, when "someone like me makes mistakes you risk destroying nations. Remember, one man still has his finger on the button".
Mr McNamara, now 84, revealed that like President Kennedy he wanted to pull American advisers out of South Vietnam, and advised Lyndon B Johnson to do so after Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. But Johnson, whom he served until his resignation in 1968 - by which time 25,000 US troops had been killed - overruled him and called him defeatist.
He stopped short , of blaming LBJ for the disaster. "I'd rather be damned if I don't say," he said., Later, in previously unaired White House tapes, he endorsed LBJ's decision. "If Kennedy had lived he would have made a difference."
The biggest lesson of Vietnam, he argued, was that the US had to learn to empathise with its enemies. "We didn't know the Vietnamese enough to empathise with them. We didn't see that they saw us as just replacing the French as the colonial power. We were fighting the cold war, but to them it was a civil war. That was our mistake."
Mr McNamara said he had agreed to unburden himself to Morris, best known for Mr Death and The Thin Blue Line, because he thought his role in life was now "to try to understand, learn the lessons and pass them on".
He has also cast fresh light on the Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear apocalypse was avoided by what he calls "muddle" and blind luck as much as JFK's leadership. He gives most of the credit for averting such disaster to a former US ambassador to Moscow, Llewellyn Thompson, who had the temerity to contradict Kennedy at the pivotal moment of the 11-day crisis, in October 1962.
General Curtis LeMay, the hawkish head of the joint chiefs of staff, who pushed for a final showdown with the Soviets, emerges as one of the key influences in Mr McNamara's life. Gen LeMay, the man on whom Dr Strangelove was apparently based, was his commanding officer in the second world war. Mr McNamara helped him devise "more efficient" means of saturation incendiary bombing.
Mr McNamara claimed that if the US had lost the war he and Gen LeMay would have been prosecuted for war crimes. "Why was it necessary to bomb Japan with atom bombs when we were burning the place down? Killing 50% to 90% of the population of 67 Japanese cities and then dropping atom bombs is not proportional."
About Vietnam, where he noted "two or three times as many bombs were dropped during [Operation] Rolling Thunder than on western Europe during the second world war," he was less clear. "Never answer the question that is asked of you, but the question you wished was asked of you," he said. "I think that's a pretty good rule."
And in another hark back to the McNamara bogeyman of old, he said: "In order to be good you have to engage in evil sometimes." |
