Misreading the Enemy
By Robert S. McNamara
Published: Wednesday, April 21, 1999


Will the war in Kosovo become another Vietnam? After barely a month of bombing Yugoslavia, it is far too soon to make such analogies. Nevertheless, there is a widespread fear that the two sides will be caught in a cycle of escalation, as occurred in Vietnam. As awful as Kosovo is now, the odds of a long-term tragedy will be far greater if we don't apply the lessons the Vietnam conflict taught us.

In fact, my great concern is that we and our adversaries may have already made mistakes that might have been avoided had we learned from experience. Studying the lessons of Vietnam may allow us to end this war earlier; ignoring them may result in catastrophe.

Over the past four years, a number of us from the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, and some of America's top scholars, have been involved in an unprecedented series of dialogues with North Vietnamese officials. Our task: to identify missed opportunities, if any existed, to avoid the war altogether or to terminate it before it became a tragedy that claimed the lives of more than 3.5 million Vietnamese and more than 58,000 Americans.

Our dialogues revealed many dimensions of mutual misunderstanding, some of which may resemble the current tragedy in the Balkans. Indeed, there are some alarming parallels, as well as some important distinctions. For example, in Vietnam each side miscalculated by repeatedly underestimating the costs and risks its adversary was willing to accept. The failure of the United States to anticipate the almost incredible losses absorbed by Vietnamese Communists, both north and south, is well known.

But we learned in our dialogues that the North Vietnamese were prepared to absorb far greater punishment than was ever delivered by the American bombing. Likewise, the Hanoi Government, in a series of disastrous miscalculations made from 1961 to 1965, repeatedly underestimated America's willingness to prosecute the war in the South on the ground, and in the North via the bombing.

In Vietnam neither side understood the bottom line of the other with regard to how South Vietnam should be governed, by whom and for how long. Each side, American and Vietnamese, discovered during the course of our dialogues that its former adversary was much more open to negotiations -- to a neutral, coalition government in Saigon -- than was believed at the time.

The point is this: These mutual misjudgments were not preordained by some process of escalation that, as is implied by many who see the Balkans through the prism of Vietnam, was beyond human control. Both the Americans and Vietnamese in the dialogues, who for the first time had access to one another's real intentions at the time, concluded that many opportunities existed along the way for leaders to do what they should have done -- lead! -- rather than ignore the Vietnam crisis in slow motion. There is at least one lesson from Vietnam that can be applied immediately. A Pentagon Papers-like project should already be under way within the United States Government so that historians will have the adequate raw material to identify the missed opportunities on the road to the Balkans War.

It is not always easy to constructively draw lessons from history. Indeed, many in the Balkans have used history and the lessons they draw from it to justify the carnage we have seen over the past several years.

We may be drawing the wrong lessons from Vietnam, too, if we believe that we should avoid ground troops at all costs or avoid applying military force in support of political or diplomatic ends. All the more reason to reconsider Vietnam and begin our consideration of what has happened in the Balkans.

This century has been the bloodiest in history. Over 160 million human beings have been killed in various conflicts, and that number rises each day. It is a dark history, but unless we look at it and seek to learn from it, it will only get darker.

My views are in no way meant to be critical, but I am not at all sure that we have learned from experience, and I worry that we will end up making the same mistakes again and again. It was once famously said that the United States did not have 10 years of experience in Vietnam, but one year of experience 10 times over. Will we say the same about the Balkans?

The McNamara Mentality

By George WILL
The death of Robert McNamara at 93 was less a faint reverberation of a receding era than a reminder that mentalities are the defining attributes of eras, and certain American mentalities recur with, it sometimes seems, metronomic regularity. McNamara came to Washington from a robust Detroit — he headed Ford when America's swaggering automobile manufacturers enjoyed 90 percent market share — to be President John Kennedy's secretary of defense. Seemingly confident that managing the competition of nations could be as orderly as managing competition among the three members of Detroit's oligopoly, McNamara entered government seven months before the birth of the current president, who is the owner and, he is serenely sure, fixer of General Motors.

Today, something unsettlingly similar to McNamara's eerie assuredness pervades the Washington in which he died. The spirit is: Have confidence, everybody, because we have, or soon will have, everything — really everything — under control.

The apogee of McNamara's professional life, in the first half of the 1960s, coincided, not coincidentally, with the apogee of the belief that behavioralism had finally made possible a science of politics. Behavioralism held — holds; it is a hardy perennial — that the social and natural sciences are not so different, both being devoted to the discovery of law-like regularities that govern the behavior of atoms, hamsters, humans, whatever.


Two of behavioralism's reinforcing assumptions were: Things that can be quantified can be controlled. And everything can be quantified. So, pick a problem, any problem. Military insurgency in Indochina? The answer is counterinsurgency. What can be, and hence must be, quantified? Body counts, surely. Bingo: a metric of success.

Not exactly. The behavior of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong did not respond as expected to America's finely calibrated stimuli, such as bombing this but not that, and bombing pauses. Behavioralists were disappointed but not discouraged. They would give nation-building another try.

It was in reaction to the mentality that McNamara represented that the Public Interest quarterly was born. Its founders were intellectuals, many of whom were called "neoconservatives" when that designation was more relevant to domestic than foreign policy. The journal's mission was to insist that (as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a Harvard social scientist, said) the function of social science is not to tell us what to do but to tell us what does not work. What did not work in the 1960s, at home and abroad, was quite a lot.

McNamara died on a day when there was interesting news from Asia, the region of his torments: There was lethal ethnic rioting in China. That development refutes, redundantly, the prophecy of a 19th-century social scientist, Karl Marx. Believing that he had discerned the laws of social physics, he said that the coming of modernity — the rise of science and the retreat of religion under the rationality of market societies — would mean that pre-industrial factors such as religion and ethnicity would lose their history-shaping saliency.

So far, the 21st century is vexed by nothing so much as those supposed residues of humanity's infancy. Nevertheless, Marx's anticipation morphed into what Moynihan called "the liberal expectancy." It is the hope — liberals tend to treat hopes as probabilities — that the fading of those atavisms and superstitions has put the world on a path to perpetual tranquility.

The world McNamara has departed could soon be convulsed by attempts to modify Iran's behavior. Since a variety of incentives have been unavailing, more muscular measures — perhaps "surgical strikes," a phrase redolent of the McNamara mentality — are contemplated.

Some persons fault the president for not having more ambitious plans to prompt and guide Iranians toward regime change. That outcome is sometimes advocated, and its consequences confidently anticipated, by neoconservatives whose certitude about feasibility resembles that which, decades ago, neoconservatism was born to counter.

Well. Every four years we saturate New Hampshire — that small, English-speaking, culturally homogenous, ethnically temperate sliver of tranquil New England — with politicians, consultants, journalists and political scientists. And often we are surprised — even dumbfounded — by how unpredictably that state's people, with their native perversity, choose to behave in their presidential primary.

McNamara, like many who leave high office, never left the capital of this nation that believes people learn from history, and that therefore history is linear and progressive. But the capital, gripped once again by the audacious hope of mastering everything, would be wise to entertain a shadow of a doubt about that.

If there had been no US invasion, would things have been different? No! think not ! You yourself said.


Dominican Republic will always continue to function as a third world country ( a term I dont agree with) as long as they continue to misplace priorities and abandon their integrity.

At the least he has apoligized for his actions, however one wishes to interpret the apology.

Will Rumsfeld and Bush ever Follow suit? Do think so they are way too stupid.

From McNamara to Obama
This too is an era of soaring rhetoric, big plans and boundless self-regard.

Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said that "in preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable." Robert S. McNamara, who spent many years thinking about the Vietnam War, first as an architect and then as a critic (and getting it wrong on both ends), was a man who believed mainly in plans.

McNamara, who died yesterday at 93, will go down as a cautionary tale for the ages, and perhaps none more than for the Age of Obama. Whatever else distinguishes JFK's New Frontier or LBJ's Great Society from Barack Obama's "New Foundation," this too is an era of soaring rhetoric, big plans and boundless self-regard, issued by an administration convinced it can apply technocratic, top-down solutions to huge and unpredictable systems -- the banking, auto and health-care industries, for instance, or the climate. These are people deeply impressed by their own smarts, the ones for whom the phrase "the best and the brightest" has been scrubbed of its intended irony.

When McNamara -- the "Whiz Kid" from Ford -- was first named defense secretary, in December 1960, Time magazine gushed that he "reads widely and well (current choices: The Phenomenon of Man, W.W. Rostow's The Stages of Growth). . . . His mind, says a friend who has seen him in Ann Arbor discussions, 'is a beautiful instrument, free from leanings and adhesions, calm and analytical.'" Nearly 50 years later, the Associated Press would lead its obituary by describing McNamara as "the cerebral secretary of defense." In between, David Halberstam -- who was for the Vietnam War before he was against it, but that's another story -- wrote that McNamara "symbolized the idea that [the Kennedy administration] could manage and control events, in an intelligent, rational way. Taking on a guerrilla war was like buying a sick foreign company; you brought your systems to it."

Of course it did not end well. Nor did it end well for McNamara with his next assignment as president of the World Bank, where he hugely increased lending on the theory that more inputs (money, "expertise" meant better outputs ("development". Instead, McNamara's stewardship of the bank helped create the Third World debt crisis, fueled Africa's descent into chaos, swelled Mobutu's Swiss bank accounts, and backed the cruel and misbegotten campaign for population control.

A recurring pattern played itself out over the 20 years McNamara spent at the Pentagon and the Bank. Giant troves of quantitative data were collected, analyzed, disaggregated and reassembled. Plans -- typically on a five-year timetable -- were conceived and then, presumably, executed. He once called the Bank "an innovative, problem-solving mechanism . . . to help fashion a better life for mankind."

Nobel Prizes in economics would later be awarded for disproving this mechanistic notion of institutions. But no Nobel was required to understand that rationalism isn't a synonym for reason, much less common sense, or that a planned solution was a workable or desirable solution, or that war or poverty were "problems" in the same sense as, say, a deficit. There was also a human element, which -- depending on whom you believe -- McNamara either didn't get or didn't have.

None of this is to say that Vietnam was "unwinnable," the liberal nostrum in which the late McNamara took comfort, or that poverty is unbeatable. On the contrary, hundreds of millions of people have worked their way out of poverty -- no thanks to the World Bank -- while a war that only three years ago was deemed unwinnable now looks very nearly won.

But all that happened only after the Planners gave way to what development economist William Easterly has called the "Searchers." As Mr. Easterly writes in his book "The White Man's Burden," "a Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A Searcher admits he doesn't know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors. A Searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation. A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions."

So, from Chile to Taiwan, economic progress only came about when national governments junked the whole idea of the planned economy. So, too, in Iraq, America's fortunes only changed when the Bush administration went from sticking to a concept ("light footprint", to searching, and finding, an answer in the surge, which combined new counterinsurgency tactics with sensitivity to local conditions. The U.S. might have won in Vietnam, too, if it had sooner discarded McNamara's concept of gradualism and gone after North Vietnam's center of gravity -- its dependence, via Haiphong harbor, on the resupply of Soviet arms.

Now that's old history. But the mentality of the planner remains alive and well in Washington today, along with the aura of cool intellectual certainty. Barack Obama might take a close look at McNamara's obituaries and note that he, too, is the whiz kid of his day.