(This first appeared in Forbes.com as a commentary immediately after the death of Robert McNamara, former US Secretary of Defence and chief of the World Bank)
July 8, 2009
It obviously wasn't just Robert McNamara who took away lessons from the Vietnam War--other participants also went through a painful learning process, but most didn't wait nearly three decades to reveal them. McNamara's headline conclusion seems to have been that Americans saw the Indochina conflict purely in the context of the Cold War and failed to comprehend it from their enemy's perspective.The most useful lesson I heard from a participant was almost trite. It came from one of the American Army's finest intelligence officers, who was married to a Vietnamese and had been "in country" from the '50s onward. He adored the place and if he was out of sight around an alley and swore in the vernacular, everybody assumed he was a Vietnamese.He too had been a true believer in the cause until the end, when suddenly the trauma of defeat made him reassess his core beliefs. His painful conclusion was that if you fervently believe in a cause, no amount of contrary evidence will ever sway your opinion, as you will always rationalize it away.
This occurs all the time in conflicts. When analysts showed the commanders of the 1944 Arnhem attacks clumps of camouflaged Tiger tanks, they were ignored because they weren't supposed to be there. In the run up to the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, again CIA agents pointed out numerous reefs surrounding the beaches only to be told that they must be reflections of clouds or even seaweed.
The most fateful example was the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the NSA was convinced that the North Vietnamese mounted a second attack on a U.S. Navy patrol, which became the trip wire for legislation that sanctioned direct U.S. combat in Vietnam. In fact, no such attack occurred but it was just what President Johnson and the Pentagon needed to create a casus belli for the escalation of the war. (Curiously, it was while being interrogated about this incident many years later, that Robert McNamara threatened to walk out of a TV interview with Charles Wheeler, the distinguished BBC reporter.)The puzzle about Robert McNamara is why he took so long to go public with his doubts about the war.
I covered the Indochina conflict, mainly in Laos but briefly in Vietnam and Cambodia, for The Times of London. Later, I spent three stimulating years as a producer on the acclaimed PBS series Vietnam: A Television History. In all of the hundreds of interviews we made around the world, the only retired U.S, policymaker who refused to speak to us was Robert McNamara. In fact, there were only two others who declined to explain their actions--Richard Nixon and President Thieu of South Vietnam. It is understandable that most participants still employed by the U.S. government were also reluctant to speak. The one honorable exception was John Negroponte, who gave an extremely lucid account of the Paris peace talks and the final days of the South Vietnamese regime.McNamara was no longer president of the World Bank when we continued to make our requests, by someone who even belonged to the same establishment clubs as he did.
I consider McNamara to have shown moral cowardice by refusing to explain himself in public, especially when he ended up opposing the policy that he was primarily responsible for in the first place.The reason democracies have a legitimacy not possessed by most other types of government is that the public has the right to information in support of or opposition to crucial policy decisions. If a senior official remains silent for years after he comes to the conclusion that his policy was absolutely wrong, it denies the voting public--and future governments--knowledge that might help avoid such blunders in the future. Millions of civilians and combatants were killed and even more maimed or otherwise wounded by this 30-year conflict, most while Robert McNamara held his counsel. I am not naïve enough to believe that by speaking out in the late '60s, events would have been dramatically different.
However, McNamara's agony over his actions is bathetic by comparison with that of the real victims of the war, whether Vietnamese or any other nationality.The earlier "crime" of McNamara was to apply the same business methods and bean-counter approach he used so successfully at Ford Motor Company to his time at the Pentagon. Operation Rolling Thunder, which was the most sustained bombing campaign in history, certainly killed more soldiers and civilians and destroyed more military equipment each year it was increased in ferocity. However, McNamara failed to take note that the North Vietnamese also upped the ante and in response succeeded in sending more men and material down the Ho Chi Minh trail each successive year.
In some ways, McNamara was the Albert Speer of the Vietnam War, in the sense that he was the rational technocrat not bothered at the time by any moral questions of his actions in prolonging a senseless war. Speer, however, delivered his mea culpa somewhat quicker than McNamara did. Perhaps the threat of being hanged by the Nuremberg judges concentrated his mind more than the ire of anti-war commentators did for McNamara.One truly beneficial action that McNamara did set in train was the commissioning of the Pentagon Papers into the cause and progress of the war. These opinions too were meant to remain hidden from public consideration but were revealed thanks to the initiative of Daniel Ellsburg and The New York Times.
Like many people from my generation, Vietnam dominated my life, though unlike many others, I emerged without any lifelong scars. Again, I began as a fervent supporter of the American war, fearing another "Munich" if the West did not stand up to "the downward thrust of Communism". (Perhaps I should add that this curious geographical assertion was because I am an Australian). However, by 1965, as a well-read provincial schoolboy, I was completely opposed to the war and even ended up in prison a couple of times for refusing to register for military conscription.
So what, in my opinion, is the lesson of the Indochina war? Quite simple really--never forget Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Essentially, this means when someone is involved in observing an experiment, they can never escape being part of the equation. This applies not just in quantum physics but in world affairs too. The mere presence of foreign troops in a local conflict simplifies the response of the population to that of resisting the invader to protect the motherland. Certainly this prompted a huge number of nationalists to initially support the Viet Cong. It was also a potent factor in the resistance to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan.
Perhaps I have more in common with Robert McNamara than I care to admit, as this was one of his belated conclusions too. I only hope that if there are any architects of contemporary policy in Central Asia with anything to say, they speak out sooner rather than later. Democracy only functions when deeds of all kind are subject to questioning and debate--not muffled by silence for decades after the event.
Bruce Palling is a writer and journalist based in London. He was a correspondent in Indochina in the early 1970s and was the first South Asia correspondent for The Independent of London. He was a producer on the award-winning PBS series Vietnam: A Television History
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