War wounds

The flag won't be flying at half-mast at the Morris compound today:

Robert Strange McNamara, the former secretary of defense whose record as a leading executive of industry and a chieftain of foreign financial aid was all but erased from public memory by his reputation as the primary architect of U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, died early this morning at age 93.

 [. . .]

On his first visit to South Vietnam in 1962, before most Americans had heard of the place and before the involvement of American combat forces, McNamara said that "every quantitative measurement we have shows we're winning this war."

[. . .]

In his memoir of the war titled "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam," McNamara said he and his senior colleagues were "wrong, terribly wrong" to pursue the war as they did. He acknowledged that he failed to force the military to produce a rigorous justification for its strategy and tactics, misunderstood Asia in general and Vietnam in particular, and kept the war going long after he realized it was futile because he lacked the courage or the ability to turn President Johnson around.

It's tempting to vilify McNamara and his "best and brightest" as villains. But as David Halberstam observed, "He was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool." He was acknowledged as a genius but so lacking in common sense that he couldn't adapt his preconceived ideas to the realities of Vietnam, so he got everything wrong.

Everyone takes different lessons from Vietnam. The one I took is that a nation should never enter a war lightly. Once the decision to go to war is made, it is immoral to just wage it incrementally and half-heartedly, with more attention paid to politics than the battlefield, the way we did in Vietnam and the way we did in Korea and the way we did in Iraq. The object should be to win it as quickly and with as little loss as possible. And we can't as a nation keep changing our minds after spending all those lives and walking away. Don't start what you can't or don't intend to finish.

McNamara didn't understand any of that, and I don't think we've really learned it since.