McNamara's Redemption

Ladies and gentlemen, get ready: R...RRRRRobert S. McNamara is back!

It's been 30 years since he was last in the lime light as the primary architect for a war which would come to be informally named after him--"McNamara's War." But don't be afraid now. Although he is back to talk about the same thing, he is here--this time--to apoligize.

In Retrospect is the title of the socalled "candid, poignant" book by the former Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Sitting in his beautiful office near the White House in Washington D.C., the old man, once revered to as the "Best and the Brightest," now 78 years old, punches his right first into his left palm with strength and determination, as if all these silent years of retrospective meditation have finally brought him a point of self-revival. "We were wrong, terribly wrong," he declares. And suddenly, he feels the monkey is off his back.

But wait a minute, the conclusion that has taken the distinguished Harvard Business School graduate so long to arrive at sounds a bit familiar. The war is a mistake--who says it is not? From the first day the United States made up its mind to send troops into jungles where they were to kill and be killed, people knew by their intuition how wrong it was. Millions of people knew this. No modern war has been or will be a rightly fought one. You don't need a shiny pedigree or a golden Harvard degree to understand.

But McNamara didn't. In his own words, he "acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation."

So these principles and traditions, ambiguous and politically flexible as they have always been, led the "Best and the Brightest" man to throw the nation into a decade of turmoil, destroying a whole generation physically and psychologically. Seeing the mistake snowballing into a tragedy, wise people cried out, protested, and ended up suffering the most. McNamara caused it all, then left office, took the helm of the Ford Motor Company and went to the World Bank, where he became an excellent leader again, and is now safe and sound, his hair still slicked back as 30 years ago. Hey, think about that song. "Only The Good Die Young."

As the proverb goes, "It's never too late to mend." McNamara is still the man. We would never expect him to come out to face contempt and criticism. And, rationally speaking, it makes little sense to go all the way back to that tumultuous period with the same indignation felt by the whole nation 20 years ago.

Time is different. The moral here is not to confirm from an old man's confessions that he was really responsible for a wrong war. Rather, as McNamara points out, the main reason that he has convinced himself to speak is to help us find "something we can take away from Vietnam that is constructive and applicable to the world of today and tomorrow." Or, to put in a Dan Quayle way, let's discuss wars in terms of not having them.

So what's the lesson to be learned? According to McNamara, "we made an error not of values and intentions but of judgement and capabilities." But this is becoming confusing. If our "judgement and capabilities" are proved wrong, don't we have to doubt the "values and intentions?"

With the pains in Vietnam gradually fading away, we witness that the U.S. is again determined to assume the ambitious responsibility of serving as the world's police. American troops are sent virtually everywhere around the globe. There are occasions when shadows of a Vietnam style of war appear just at our proverbial door-step. Fortunately, America at least hasn't lost any of these small-scale wars.

But are we able to say that America now has a good sense of judgement? Innocent lives have nevertheless been taken away in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and wherever the U.S. rashly intends to bring peace by force. Thank God, the death toll in Iraq or Somalia hasn't exceeded the nation's apparent tolerance.

However, the cost of this believed-to-be-true "political omnipotence" does not only come from wars. The bombs that hit the World Trade Center two years ago and Oklahoma City two days ago repeat the message that this country has become terrorists' No. 1 target because of its I'm the-world's-cop foreign policy.

Men, women and children died in an instant as the car bomb tore down the nine-storey building. Something wrong with our judgement and capabilities again?

You can't judge, and you don't have the capability of persuading terrorists not to hit a peaceful place like Oklahoma City. President Clinton mustn't be mad that the nation's principles and traditions are violated again. The real question is: why did these animals choose America to attack at all? Doesn't America just care about too much about other countries--which causes those stubborn countries to rebel--while caring too little about itself?

It is time to get away from rigidly sticking to those so-called traditions and values on the international stage. Get away from Haiti, from Panama, from Bosnia. Otherwise it is very likely for another Defense Secretary to over estimate the "danger" somewhere some day, as McNamara did in 1966. We can't afford to see another costly and meaningless war, nor another book of confessions.