How McNamara Lost World War II by Greg Palast

[Demeter]

http://www.gregpalast.com/how-mcnamara-lost-world-war-ii/

It's been a good week. Robert McNamara's dead and my book, Armed Madhouse, was released in translation in Vietnam...

Vietnamese gun boats had attacked American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Times said so. President Johnson said so. His Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said so.

But on the Oval Office tapes, Johnson said, "Hell, those damn stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish." McNamara corrected him later. They were shooting at their own "sonar shadow." But that, of course, wouldn't be mentioned in the Times.

My dad didn't need LBJ's tape to know: they lied.
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My father always found flag-wavers a bit suspect. But he was a patriot, nurturing this deep and intelligent patriotism. To him, America stood for Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Four Freedoms.

My father’s army had liberated Hitler’s concentration camps and later protected Martin Luther King’s marchers on the road to Birmingham. His America put its strong arm around the world’s shoulder as protector. On the back of the medal, it read “Freedom from Want and Fear.”

His victory over Japan was a victory of principles over imperial power, of freedom over tyranny, of right over Japan’s raw military might...

The politicians had ordered his army, with its fierce postwar industrial killing machines, to set upon Asia’s poor. Too well read in history and too experienced in battle, he knew what was coming. He could see right then what it would take other Americans ten years of that war in Vietnam to see: American bombers dropping napalm on straw huts, burning the same villages Hirohito’s invaders had burned twenty years earlier.

Johnson and McNamara had taken away his victory over Japan.

They stole his victory over tyranny. When we returned home, he dropped his medals into my twelve-year-old hands to play with and to lose among my toys.

[Joe Chi Minh]

1. Strange. I was just thinking about that crazy/not so crazy artist from

Martha's Vineyard, who almost managed to turf McNamara over the rail of the Martha's Vineyard ferry, as a war criminal. A very funny incident. I don't now if even the French or other Latins are quite as wild as your wildmen.

[truedelphi]

2. ah-h.

This is familar to me because of my own father and how he began anti-watr discussions with me when I was two or so.

One of the first things I ever remember him saying was that when he was my age, they launched this magnificent war, The War to End All Wars. (1914 to 1918)

He said very patiently, "If they ever tell you they have a war to end all wars set up, don't participate. War cannot end war!"

And I too had all his World War II medals and combat helmets and hats to play with as a kid.