American leaders don’t easily learn lessons from the past. Before choosing war in Iraq, the Bush leadership might profitably have consulted former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara 1995 memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam or seen Fog of War, the carefully made Errol Morris documentary featuring the former Kennedy Administration Whiz Kid. In his own words McNamara ‘put before the American people why their government and its leaders behaved as they did and what we may learn from their experience.’
Pour se libérer de trois décennies de culpabilité accumulée tout en se débattant et en se défendant, McNamara propose l'histoire intérieure de l'homme qui a dirigé la guerre du Vietnam sous les présidences Kennedy et Johnson (1961-8). Son horreur de la guerre elle-même et la réponse du mouvement anti-guerre ont motivé cet ancien génie de Harvard et PDG de Ford Motor Company à s'exprimer. Mais la réaction négative à la guerre du Vietnam, plus que la guerre elle-même, a poussé McNamara à laisser les étrangers jeter un coup d’œil sur l’élite mondiale qui prend les décisions.
‘I have grown sick at heart,’ he wrote, ‘witnessing the cynicism and even contempt with which so many people view our political institutions and leaders.’
Je crains que le film et les mémoires littéraires de McNamara ne fassent qu'accroître ce cynisme et ce mépris. Je me demande ce que ressentent les parents de soldats ou de civils morts, vietnamiens, américains et irakiens, comme ce scénario se répète, lorsqu'ils lisent que dès 1966, McNamara était devenu « de plus en plus sceptique quant à notre capacité à atteindre nos objectifs politiques au Vietnam par le biais de l'armée ». moyens.' Néanmoins, poursuit-il, « cela n’a pas diminué mon implication dans l’élaboration de la politique vietnamienne ».
At age 85, McNamara gropes for the elusive coherence that can offer a graceful endgame. I recall him in 1965 examining body counts on TV, as if they comprised the essence of his daily business report as Ford CEO. In TV appearances he explained why the President’s decision to send more U.S. troops to Vietnam signaled impending victory. During this time, he now admits, he knew the war was both wrong and un-winnable. But not until his 1995 visit to Vietnam, he now avers, did he understand that the Vietnamese fought their war for independence, not as part of the Cold War scheme. This revelation offers insight into McNamara’s moral learning disability, that ethical gap that allowed him to order missions of death without questioning his own integrity. He told the public as he dispatched young men to kill and be killed that he saw ‘light at the end of the tunnel.’
Vietnam was ‘McNamara’s War’ as much as Iraq is Rumsfeld’s. But thanks to the movie, we know that McNamara has a strong emotional side ‘ unlike Rummy, whose distorted haiku speech and irritable manner create the image of a thick-skinned executive.
When Norman Morrison burned himself to death in 1965 to protest the war outside of McNamara’s Pentagon office window, as Buddhist monks had done in Vietnam, McNamara ‘reacted to the horror of his action by bottling up my emotions and avoided talking about them with anyone, even my family. I knew Marg and our three children shared many of Morrison’s feelings about the war, as did the wives and children of several of my cabinet colleagues. And I believed I shared some of these thoughts. There was much that Marg and I and the children should have talked about, yet at moments like this I often turn inward instead-it is a grave weakness.’
McNamara sensed that his soul was at stake, but the glimmers of humane feelings that he allowed himself to acknowledge confronted a stronger, deeper commitment to servicing power, an ‘obligation’that vitiated his ability to see right and wrong.
McNamara continued to support the Vietnam War in public because his loyalty to the President demanded it. Indeed, he interpreted his constitutional oath to include obedience to Presidential dictates.
He also owed the President his business assessment: the Vietnam War was unprofitable. Ironically, McNamara used this formula to arrive at his moral judgment: unprofitable means wrong. The brilliant accountant and business visionary, however, could not see demarcate clear moral lines between his ‘logic of figures’and life and death.
In Fog of War, he notes that US fire bombing Japanese cities and dropping two nuclear bombs over civilian targets might fall under the category of war crimes. He sermonizes about the seeming inability of humans to stop making wars. Yet, for all of his lesson-teaching in the film and book about the barbarism of war, McNamara reluctantly admires the clarity of men like General Curtis Lemay, the U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff (1961-65).
LeMay, selon ses propres mots, était un tueur psychopathe, un homme désireux d'utiliser des armes nucléaires contre Cuba et l'Union soviétique lors de la crise des missiles de 1962, un commandant qui n'a pas hésité à risquer la vie de ses propres pilotes pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. en les faisant voler à des altitudes plus basses, s'exposant ainsi aux attaques anti-aériennes et de chasseurs afin d'augmenter leur précision.
LeMay had no moral dilemmas. War meant killing the enemy and losing as many of your own as you had to lose. Period! The more complicated McNamara had to choose: power versus conscience. In the film he took the Defense Secretary job because it would benefit his family. And he defends that decision, even though his wife got sick and his kids became estranged from him. Not until the end of the Cold War did he find it convenient -and maybe necessary — to save his soul. He maintains, however, a gray line between mistakes and sins, a kind of moral fuzziness that doesn’t quite coincide with atonement or soul saving.
McNamara presents himself as a moral man. Among his axioms of faith was the assumption that the United States undertook overseas actions only for noble purposes. Through this obfuscating lens, he could not ‘ and cannot — see himself as an imperialist. Since he served the elected president of a democracy, how could he possibly make imperial policies?
Because of this epistemological failing, he could not understand that Vietnamese nationalists had been fighting for independence from China and then France for centuries. So this often brutally self-critical man remains in his political thinking an unacknowledged imperialist.
Je suis content qu'il ait écrit le livre et qu'il soit apparu dans le film. Son témoignage personnel dramatise la tromperie du passé et devrait rendre la génération actuelle très sceptique quant à toutes les affirmations de Bush sur l'Irak.
But one must proceed with caution about the lessons McNamara teaches. He has sinned and seeks atonement. That is good. But the depth of his evil eludes him. By not acknowledging that the United States intervened for non-democratic motives to try to defeat a legitimate nationalist force in Vietnam, he falls short of achieving a platform for atonement.
En effet, il maintient toujours que « les États-Unis d’Amérique ont combattu au Vietnam pendant huit ans pour ce qu’ils considéraient comme des raisons bonnes et honnêtes… pour protéger notre sécurité, empêcher la propagation du communisme totalitaire et promouvoir la liberté individuelle et la démocratie politique ».
Such clichés ring so hollow in the face of 3.4 million dead Vietnamese and 58 thousand dead Americans. The stubborn McNamara still maintains that those who launched the war had nothing but venerable aims ‘ as do the defenders of the Iraq War and occupation.
McNamara might write a guide book on the morality of power ‘ an oxymoron? He simply blurred distinctions between intentions and poor war strategy. As Defense Secretary for seven years he simply ignored the incongruities between Washington’s trite expression of noble goals and the bestiality in Vietnam ‘required’to achieve them. He pressed on, as he admits ‘ravaging a beautiful country and sending young Americans to their death year after year, because they [the war planners] had no other plan.’
The war could have and should have been halted, McNamara concedes, but he and fellow Johnson senior advisers failed to do so ‘through ignorance, inattention, flawed thinking, political expediency, and lack of courage.’
Oui, manque de courage ! Les hauts responsables du gouvernement appliquent une logique d’intervention qui les isole, dresse un mur entre les questions qu’ils devraient poser et auxquelles ils devraient répondre avant d’ordonner des missions de bombardement contre des villes – au Vietnam ou en Irak.
In his modified mea culpa, his presumably last public thrust, McNamara attempts to both expiate guilt and teach lessons. Have President Bush and his advisers learned from these memoirs? The unscrupulous continue to counsel the amoral Crown. The Secretary of State lacks the courage to demand the King change his erroneous course. Like McNamara, Colin Powell plays the obedient servant to power. Recall that Cyrus Vance resigned and set an example for integrity because he understood that President Carter’s hare-brained ‘rescue’mission in Iran could lead to truly devastating consequences.
In his book, McNamara strives for grace, citing T.S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’: ‘And last the rending pain of reenactment/ Of all that you have done and been; the shame/ Of motives late revealed, and the awareness/ Of things ill done and done to others’ harm/ Which once you took for exercise of virtue.’
The repentant but still strangely arrogant McNamara might better have used Goethe’s words from Faust. ‘The worm am I, that in the dust does creep.’
Le nouveau film de Landau, SYRIE : ENTRE L'IRAK ET UN ENDROIT DUR est disponible via Cinema Guild 1-800-723-5522. Son dernier livre est L'EMPIRE PRÉEMPTIVE : UN GUIDE DU ROYAUME DE BUSH. Il enseigne à l'Université Cal Poly Pomona et est membre de l'Institut d'études politiques. Ses essais paraissent en espagnol sur www.rprogreso.com