Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 18, 1995 TAG: 9505180014
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: NICHOLAS J. PAPPAS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
An eye-opener it is! At one level it is a catalogue of failures. According to McNamara, the people in charge of the war misjudged not only the war aims of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong but also the politics and personalities in the Republic of Vietnam. They also overestimated the power of technology to influence political events. Further, they failed to enlist congressional support, and could not find the language to explain the war effort to the American people.
Then, as if to multiply the effects of their oversights, they failed to recognize that American military power can be used only under the aegis of multilateral forces genuinely supported by the international community. Finally, this litany of mistakes was overshadowed by the architectonic error: the failure "to organize the top echelons of the executive branch to deal effectively with the extraordinarily complex range of political and military issues."
At another level, the book is a staggering series of recurring second thoughts. Why didn't I force the military to fully debate their strategic differences? Why didn't I force a knock-down, drag-out fight over the hazy assumptions behind policy positions? Why weren't the serious divisions among the Joint Chiefs of Staff aired and resolved? Why did we not ask the armed forces the hard questions about costs and the chances of success that demanded hard answers?
The ironic nature of the recurring questions is revealed if we examine part of the subtitle, "the Tragedy ... of Vietnam," from the perspective of the ethics of classical tragedy. In the tragedies of Aeschylus, a great souled person is put into a difficult situation that requires him or her to resolve - temporarily - the tension between ananke (necessity) and dike (righteousness) and make a decision for dike. Then, the community must be convinced by persuasion to do what is right.
For example, in "The Suppliants," the king of Argos must do some diving into the depths of his soul and the moral order in which it lives to grant asylum to 50 Egyptian women fleeing injustice, despite the possibility of a war between Argos and the Egyptian king. In this system of ethics, the avoidance of a decision for dike in the field of action is itself as great a sin as being compelled by brute necessity. From the perspective of Aeschylus, "In Retrospect" is the record of a series of tragic failures and "what ifs?" on the part of the writer himself.
What, besides the creation of a super executive branch composed of many McNamaras, are "The Lessons of Vietnam?" The author repudiates what he calls the "realist" understanding of politics and war that emphasizes politics as a struggle for power, the national interest and the balance of power as a perennial feature of international relations. Instead, the United States must realize that the world has become more interdependent "economically, environmentally and with regard to security."
As a result, we must create a conception of a post-Cold War world that rests on the foundations of the rule of the law and true collective security where "conflict prevention, conflict resolution and peacekeeping functions" would be performed by strengthened multilateral institutions and the United Nations. An appendix also makes the case for a nuclear-free world.
At the front of the book, we find McNamara as a younger hard-line "realist" who approved of George Kennan's "X" article that contained the blueprint for "Containment." Has McNamara mellowed after years of painful reflection? No. Support for transnational institutions, the use of force under the banner of the United Nations, the diminution of national sovereignty and the creation of a supersovereign New World Order are only the logical working out of the premises of political realism. The nation-state has simply proved to be too limited a unit for the realist dream of the modern project-large, powerful political units that protect people from violent death and satisfy their passions.
It is McNamara's "realism" that makes Thucydides' "The Peloponnesian War" the perfect companion reading for "In Retrospect." Thucydides pictures the Hellenistic world in a state of disorder: Words have lost or changed their meaning, politics is reduced to the struggle for power, the tension between ananke and dike is resolved permanently by elevating compulsion to a principle of action, and justice is reduced to the "value" of the rule of the stronger. Statesmen and soldiers seem to be blind to the reality of the Good and the order of Zeus.
Perhaps Thucydides' work gives us a picture of "inside McNamara," who never seems to have caught on that war is not the continuation of policy by other means but hate, fear, love, cowardice, death, wounds, pity, remorse, and Good and Evil: all the factors that cannot be fed into the calculations of running a large corporation. As Vietnam veterans read "In Retrospect," they can conjure up a certain sympathy or even pity for this man. McNamara is not some cold-hearted efficiency expert, but is only a breach in a defensive wall, through which the dark forces of disorder are pouring, carrying them to death and wounds in a place nobody really knew much about.
A Parthian shot at "In Retrospect" raises the question why men like McNamara and George Kennan have to wait so long to repent of inadequacies or contradictions in their thinking. Is it the lack of a certain kind of education that raises basic questions about the nature of justice and prudential action? Perhaps the question is unfounded because it may be that our society gladly suffers the folly of foolish leaders and then praises them when they grow old and write books.
Nicholas J. Pappas is an associate professor of political science at Radford University.
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"In Retrospect" is the record of a series of tragic failures and "what ifs?" on the part of the writer himself.
by CNB