Word: mcnamara
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Five days before the 20th anniversary of the United States' withdrawal from Vietnam, former U.S. secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara told an overflow crowd at the Institute of Politics last night that he was "wrong, terribly wrong" in prolonging the Vietnam...
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...