Hailed as one of ‘the best and the brightest’ of his age, Robert McNamara was a ditherer who lacked courage
If you were at a conference or seminar at one of the Washington thinktanks a few years back, your attention would sometimes be caught by a tall, loose jointed man in casual clothes and with battered trainers on his large feet, who would lollop in, sit down, and then, in a quiet voice, make the sort of common sense remarks which are all too often a rarity at such gatherings.
He always enhanced and humanised the discussion. He knew about population growth and birth control, about food production, about development and aid, and about the pollution which accompanies economic growth. He also knew about wars, but was less often heard on that subject. This was Robert McNamara, a man whose name will forever be identified with the Vietnam war, although the truth was that he turned against the war earlier than many others involved in prosecuting it.
McNamara was the most prominent of those whom New York Times war reporter David Halberstam called “the best and the brightest.” They were the clever and confident men, drawn from diplomacy, political life, academia, industry and the military, who set out to succeed in Vietnam according to a simple equation – resources times application times determination equals victory. Nor were they, in principle, wrong: it was simply that the other side turned out to have more of all three.
McNamara’s specialty was the industrialised warfare in which the United States had been the leader ever since the country’s civil war, a kind of war in which the battlefield is seen as the terminal point of a mass production process that pours in firepower until the opponent is overwhelmed. McNamara had sorted out the Ford motor company, ennabling it to deliver more and better cars to the market. What better man to deliver the bombs and shells which would sort out the Vietnam war ? But this managerial concept minimised the fact that war is a skilled human activity demanding flair, intuition and a knowledge of the enemy. And it was also an concept which tended to shirk, or skirt, moral issues. Was the war just ? Was it being waged in a just manner ?
These were questions which, if not entirely ignored, were at best compartmentalised in an approach which concentrated on bringing the maximum resources to bear on the combat zone. If there was some excuse for it, and if it had some success, in the second world war, where McNamara had his first military experience analysing air force mission data, it was peculiarly unsuited to the war in Vietnam. It was literally meaningless to tot up the number of bombing missions, the number of artillery shells fired, the number of enemy dead, or the number of bridges taken out in North Vietnam. They were just statistical froth on top of deep waves. The war was being decided at a much more fundamental level.
McNamara was a fount of obtuse optimism at a critical period, even though he was also too intelligent to stay with the mass production approach for long. He understood that there was a disparity of will between the two sides which gave the Vietnamese Communists an advantage which was probably insuperable. By early 1967 he was advising President Lyndon Johnson to seek peace. In response Johnson moved him to the World Bank and, in effect, out of American politics. But he was a ditherer who lacked courage and who in later life constantly leafed through events in search of explanations, or interpretations, that emphasised his better moments and seemed to make him less culpable for his worst.
McNamara’s offence lay less in presiding over the early stages of the war, than in keeping his doubts to himself afterwards. If he had publicly opposed the war immediately after he left the Pentagon, who knows what effect it might have had? Johnson is thought to have believed that McNamara intended to support Robert F Kennedy in a 1968 campaign to win the presidency on a peace platform. But the World Bank appointment removed McNamara from the scene, and Sirhan Sirhan removed Bobby Kennedy from life itself.
The war ran on for many more years and took many more Vietnamese and American lives. McNamara was a decent man who agonised over his role in the Vietnam war for the rest of his life. His is a prime example of the truth of the maxim that life is lived forwards but understood – and regretted – backwards.
Mired in deceit and denial
Robert McNamara was haunted by an act of great military folly. Those who order war in Afghanistan risk a similiar, awful fate
Until late in life, Robert McNamara was a familiar presence on the streets of Washington. You would see him walking along Connecticut Avenue on his way to and from his office. Most of the time he was in a light suit, a white shirt and trainers, a distinctive mix of dapper and dishevelled. But the thing you noticed most was the look in his eyes – what the New York Times obituary this week rightly called his thousand-yard stare.
That stare told you everything. It told you that McNamara was haunted by the Vietnam war. Once, he had owned the Indochina conflict. People called it McNamara’s war. “I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it,” he said. As defence secretary he sent half a million Americans to war, of whom 58,000 eventually died. He launched three times as many bombs on Vietnam as were dropped in world war two. By 1967 McNamara had privately concluded that the effort was futile. Much later he admitted in public that Vietnam was “wrong, terribly wrong” and that nuclear weapons, which he had once seen as indispensable, served “no military purpose whatsoever”.
McNamara was a brilliant obsessive in command of an act of epochal military folly. He learned a hard lesson the hard way, though others paid a higher price. But he has died when history increasingly seems to be repeating itself. Today’s policymakers are playing out their own Vietnam in Afghanistan. The fear that this too is an unwinnable war grows more widespread, and thus more politically influential, by the week. And this has been a terrible week, with the US, Canada and Britain all taking fatalities, and a large civilian death toll from a bomb near Kabul today.
Bob Ainsworth is no Bob McNamara. But Britain’s defence secretary was worried enough about the unravelling in Afghanistan to make it the focus of a speech at Chatham House on Wednesday. There were compelling reasons to be in Afghanistan, Ainsworth said. The engagement went to “the heart of this country’s national security” and to “the core of our national interests”. It was a “hard and dangerous” conflict in which more lives would be lost. But the US and its allies were a force for good. There was new military momentum. There was no defined date for the end of the campaign, but “we will win”.
We have heard every bit of this before. It doesn’t make it wrong, but almost everything that Ainsworth says about Afghanistan is an echo of what McNamara once said about Vietnam. There too the conflict was supposedly vital to the national strategic interest. There too there was always new momentum. There too there was nothing that could not be achieved by another infusion of fresh troops.
That’s not to pretend that the two campaigns are identical, because they are not. On grounds of scale, Ainsworth was right to reject comparisons with Vietnam, as he did this week. It was the draft, as well as setbacks in the field, that turned the tide against Vietnam. But it is significant that Ainsworth was challenged to deny the parallel, and the difference in scale is not as reassuring as he implied. If 1,200 allied casualties in Afghanistan since 2001 can generate current levels of western scepticism and disillusion about the Afghan campaign, then think what opposition would be generated by Vietnam levels of losses.
Not for the first time, though, the Liberal Democrats have been proved right about Britain’s wars of intervention. Nick Clegg’s indictment of the government’s Afghan policy was an important domestic political move, because it challenges the eight-year UK party consensus over Afghanistan. But it was the more significant precisely because Clegg is an interventionist by nature, who leads a party which backed the military and legal case for the original engagement in the aftermath of 9/11. Clegg’s attack stopped short of calling for withdrawal from Afghanistan, but his charge that the government lacks the will, strategy and tactics to see the job through puts the other parties on notice, if nothing else, that Afghanistan could be an election issue.
The real difficulties of the mission are immense, but absence of political will is at the heart of this too. No disrespect to Ainsworth – as footballers would say – but the appointment of a previously middle-ranking minister of no very obvious outstanding qualities to run a war tells you that Gordon Brown does not take Afghanistan seriously. Four defence secretaries in three years tells you that No 10′s mind is not focused on the conflict either. I’m sure Brown would rather the Afghan war didn’t exist – so would we all – but pretending it isn’t there won’t make it go away.
Ainsworth’s announcement this week of a new strategic defence review could in theory provide much-needed focus. It is the first since 1998 but, more important, the first since 9/11. But the review hasn’t a chance of providing what this country requires – an objective account of Britain’s national security aims and needs for the foreseeable future, in the context of what we can afford and what we can achieve with our allies.
The review will be a useless deceit because Britain’s nuclear weapons are not included, and neither are our two still-unbuilt new aircraft carriers. Nor, for electoral reasons, will Labour or the Tories be honest about what might or might not be done better through European defence co-operation. Yet cuts of at least 10% to the defence budget seem inescapable under whichever party wins the general election.
As a result, Britain has the worst of all worlds. We refuse to talk truthfully about national, regional and global security priorities. We are dishonest about what we can afford on our own and about how we can co-operate with others. Meanwhile we go on fighting the wrong war in the wrong way in Afghanistan, creating enemies abroad and disillusionment at home. When outside experts try to do the job that government ducks – as the IPPR security commission did last month – ministers run a mile while shadow ministers stay in denial. The result is that we talk loud and carry a small stick.
Robert McNamara may have gone to his grave. But his spirit – that disabling inability to speak sense in public about the profoundest of policy issues until after the damage has been done – is alive and well and living in Britain. In years to come, watch out for the once proud former ministers shuffling silently along Whitehall. You will know them by their thousand-yard stare.