The end of a McEra

Robert Strange McNamara died today at 93 years of age. Every piece of news on the matter I have seen or heard first describes his role as the architect of the Vietnam war (he was Kennedy's and then Johnson's Secretary of Defense). And then describes his actions, and/or the war in general, as a mistake. That to me isn't news. What is news is that for the past 10 years, McNamara has been attempting to make amends for his past deeds by trying to learn why and how he and the rest of Washington sent hundreds of thousands of young American men to their deaths and millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians. By writing books on the subject, sitting down for interviews, by attending conferences with his counter parts at the time of the war.

In 1995, he took a stand against his own conduct of the war, confessing in a memoir that it was “wrong, terribly wrong.” In return, he faced a firestorm of scorn.

“Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen,” The New York Times said in a widely discussed editorial, written by the page’s editor at the time, Howell Raines. “Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late.”

By then he wore the expression of a haunted man. He could be seen in the streets of Washington — stooped, his shirttail flapping in the wind — walking to and from his office a few blocks from the White House, wearing frayed running shoes and a thousand-yard stare.

He had spent decades thinking through the lessons of the war. The greatest of these was to know one’s enemy — and to “empathize with him,” as Mr. McNamara explained in Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary, “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.”

“We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes,” he said. The American failure in Vietnam, he said, was seeing the enemy through the prism of the cold war, as a domino that would topple the nations of Asia if it fell.

That wasn't the only war he which admitted to wrongdoing even.

In the film, Mr. McNamara described the American firebombing of Japan’s cities in World War II. He had played a supporting role in those attacks, running statistical analysis for Gen. Curtis E. LeMay of the Army’s Air Forces.

“We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children,” Mr. McNamara recalled; some 900,000 Japanese civilians died in all. “LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals.”

“What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” he asked. He found the question impossible to answer.

To my knowledge, no one ever accused the former president of Ford Motor Company of incompetency.

Chester L. Cooper, a senior official at the State Department when McNamara was at Defense, wrote in "The Lost Crusade" that McNamara's brilliant staff and his "unique ability to grasp and synthesize a vast mass and variety of information made him the best informed official in Washington." But McNamara's insistence on dealing with Vietnam in the same way he dealt with other issues led him into miscalculations, Cooper said. Cooper summarized McNamara's approach in a memorable portrait:

"His typical trip involved leaving Washington in the evening and, after a 24-hour journey and a 13-hour time change, arriving at Saigon at eight in the morning. The Secretary would emerge from the plane and suggest graciously that his fellow-travelers take a half-hour or so to wash up and then join him at a 9 o'clock briefing at MACV [Military Assistance Command Vietnam] headquarters. There, for the next three hours, they were expected not merely to add up figures but to absorb a rapid-fire series of complicated military briefings. . . . . While we less adaptable beings desperately attempted to make sense out of the mass of information, McNamara queried every apparent inconsistency and was usually well ahead of the briefers."

He and his "whiz kids" were supposed to use their knowledge from running big complex companies and all of the modern management tools of statistical and systems analysis. In the end, all of his brains and skills didn't help him from dragging the U.S. deeper and deeper into an unnecessary war that had nothing to do with communism or the balance of power.

But the fact that a man who has been characterized as a monster chose to face many of his mistakes head on and in public is a very admirable thing that his family should be proud of and that Americans should reward in their their public servants.

Sure it took him 30 years to admit to some, but not all of his mistakes, even though at the time he was coming to realize the folly of the war.

When Mr. McNamara held a rare private briefing for reporters in Honolulu in February 1966, he no longer possessed the radiant confidence he had always displayed in public. Mr. McNamara said with conviction, “No amount of bombing can end the war.”
...
On Sept. 19, 1966, Mr. McNamara telephoned Johnson.

“I myself am more and more convinced that we ought definitely to plan on termination of bombing in the North,” Mr. McNamara said, according to White House tapes.

He also suggested establishing a ceiling on the number of troops to be sent to Vietnam. “I don’t think we ought to just look ahead to the future and say we’re going to go higher and higher and higher and higher — 600,000; 700,00; whatever it takes.”

The president’s only response was an unintelligible grunt.

Yet the path towards making amends wasn't a smooth one:

An incident that reflected the temper of those tense, bitter years occurred in November 1966, when McNamara traveled to Harvard for an informal discussion with undergraduates. He was mobbed by about 800 jeering students, who blocked his car and cried "Murderer!"

The secretary, never apologetic, climbed atop his car, in shirt sleeves despite the New England chill, and told the crowd: "I spent four of the happiest years of my life on the Berkeley campus, doing some of the things you do today. But I was tougher than you, and I'm tougher than you are now. I was more courteous then, and I hope I'm more courteous today."

He also tried to do the right thing as head of the World Bank.

As he had done at the Pentagon and Ford, Mr. McNamara sought to remake the bank. When he arrived on April 1, 1968, the bank was lending about $1 billion a year. That figure grew until it stood at $12 billion when he left in 1981. By that time the bank oversaw some 1,600 projects valued at $100 billion in 100 nations, including hydroelectric dams, superhighways and steel factories.

The ecological effects of these developments, however, had not been taken into account. In some cases, corruption in the governments that the bank sought to help undid its good intentions. Many poor nations, overwhelmed by their debts to the bank, were not able to repay loans.

The costs of Mr. McNamara’s work thus sometimes outweighed the benefits, and that led to a concerted political attack on the bank itself during the 1980s.

He did more than get dams built as president of the World Bank.

He spent a year, for example, thinking about what to say in a 1982 speech at the University of the Witwatersrand, in apartheid South Africa. Then he told his audience that America's "century of delay in moving to end our shameful discrimination toward black Americans . . . was without question the most serious mistake in our entire history, and the hard truth is that all Americans will continue to [pay] a heavy price for it for decades to come." He urged South Africa not to make the same mistake.

I read his last book, Argument without End and attended a Q & A when he came to speak at my college (because Prof. James Blight was the co-author). He came across as a brilliant man seeking repentance and trying to tell the world how to avoid another Vietnam. Yet he did not speak out against the Iraq War in 2002 or 2003. The closest he got was this:

“We are the strongest nation in the world today,” Mr. McNamara said in “The Fog of War,” released at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “I do not believe that we should ever apply that economic, political, and military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn’t have been there. None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can’t persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we’d better re-examine our reasoning.”

“War is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend,” he concluded. “Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.”

The real question to ponder today is not McNamara's legacy, whether he was a great man or an arrogant one, but whether, in 30 years or less, Donald Rumsfeld will be making the rounds apologizing for his immoral actions and incompetence. McNamara was still a young man when LBJ kicked him upstairs to the World Bank; he still had 42 years left to live after leaving the Pentagon. In contrast, Rumsfeld is 77 years old. If he is so lucky to live as long as McNamara, he only has 20 years to confess to his crimes against humanity. His memoir, slated to come out next year, sounds like a defense of his actions, not catharsis. Will anyone within the Bush inner circle have a McNamara-style change of heart and desire to come to terms with that they did? Sadly, I doubt it.

nothing to fear but lack of fearmongering itself

Today is the day when we celebrate the birth of America, even though the Declaration was actually passed by the Continental Congress a few days before that.

Yesterday, we watched a spectacle too oft repeated these days: the self-implosion of a GOP presidential hopeful. First Bobby Jindal, then Mark Sanford, and now Sarah Palin. But someone else wants to grab our attention desperately and no matter what your politics in the U.S., you can agree with me that this guy is crazy.

North Korea fired a barrage of short-range missiles off its east coast Thursday, a possible prelude to the launch of a long-range missile toward Hawaii over the July Fourth holiday.

The AP tries to scare us. Long range missiles? Aimed at President Obama's home state on America's birthday weekend? But wait, did you catch the key word, "toward"? How long is "long range"? Let's ask the Posrt:

Military officials told South Korea's Yonhap news agency that they appeared to be Scud-type missiles and described them as more dangerous than the short-range weapons fired Thursday.

Government sources in Japan and South Korea told reporters that the missiles may have been Nodongs, a mid-range Scud.

North Korea has more than 200 of these missiles, which are capable of striking nearly all of Japan. They are regarded by the Japanese government as a serious threat, and it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years buying two U.S.-made anti-missile defense systems.

Scuds, the legendarily inaccurate missiles Saddam used during the first Gulf War. This one too is extremely crude for 2009.

A Nodog has a range of 500 to 1300 kilometers depending on whether it is a Nodog-1 or -2. And remember it is about 3800 kilometers from Tokyo to Honolulu, and from North Korea you have to add another couple hundred kilometers. Which explains this paragraph of the AP story:

The head of the U.S. Northern Command, Gen. Victor E. "Gene" Renuart, said in an interview with the Washington Times this week that U.S. missile defenses are prepared to knock down any incoming North Korean missile.

Now to be fair the Taepodong-2 missile could hit Sarah Palin's house in Wasilla (making her a foreign policy expert). But the other reason Northern Command is prepared to knock down any long-range missile from North Korea is this:

In 2006, North Korea launched its most advanced Taepodong 2 missile while the U.S. celebrated Independence Day, though the rocket fizzled shortly after takeoff and fell into the ocean.
...
The April 5 [2009] launch of a Taepodong-2 required 12 days of preparation on the launch pad, which was fully observable to U.S. satellites. Short and medium-range missiles, however, can be launched with little notice.

So they can try to hit a major city in Japan and risk not only pissing off but hitting U.S. military forces stationed on the archipelago, or they can try to hit the U.S. directly, but it takes so long for those missiles to warm up, we can blow them on the launch pad with ease if we felt like it. No need for "Star Wars" here. The Axis of Evil, in short, is no excuse for the so-called National Missile Defense.

This is all a long way of saying the AP article, which was picked up by the Tribune, among others is all about scaring us despite the fact that the only think North Korea is capable of is starving its own people while building crappy weapons.

the imaginary middle

I have grown tired of those who claim to represent the ideological center but in actuality only represent their need to be the center of attention and action. Yesterday, I had lunch with one of my Conservative Republican friends who agrees with me on this point, as well as who the phony centrists are.

So, to name names and get particular, by phony centrists, we mean Sens. John McCain, Kent Conrad, Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh, Olympia Snowe, Arlen Specter, and SCOTUS Justice Kennedy. These people continuously create imaginary divisions and problems so that they can be the solvers of said problem and the beltway media can fawn over them about how statesmanlike, bipartisan, centrist, important and powerful they are.

There are countless examples, but here are a few. Thanks to a prior vote earlier this year, Democrats can pass health care reform within the budget process, which means they only need 50 votes and their can't be a filibuster. Moreover, the budget framework already passed (which created 50 votes only possibility) set aside $634 billion as a "down payment" on health care reform. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scored the Senate Health Education Labor and Pension (HELP) Committee bill to cost $611 billion. Using my amazing math skills, this means that if this bill is passed as is, there is $24 billion of wiggle room when you merge the Senate Finance Committee bill into the HELP bill and only 50 votes are needed to pass the HELP bill. Yet Sen. conrad wants there to be some sort of fake compromise to axe the public option, claiming the health care reform legislation is in a "60 vote environment." Sens. Snowe, Specter, and the other Maine Senator who just does whatever Snowe does changed the Stimulus Bill to cap it at some arbitrary number so that they could be "fiscally responsible."

Justice Kennedy's need to be in the middle often results in unreadable and incomprehensible opinions that cause confusion for lower courts and attorneys. Other times, the opinions just make no sense and are internally inconsistent.

The problem is not just bad policy is the result of their pomposity but the fact that these folks are only representing themselves and there is not a silent majority of folks in the middle that agree with them. They oppose or alter widely popular things just so they can have their fingerprints on them and get written up in the big papers. Enough already.

What a crazy week of news: a governor that skipped out on his state, staff, and family to go see his lover in Argentina; the US getting to its first FIFA finals and only losing by one goal to Brazil; the sudden, odd death of Michael Jackson; and now Billy "shouting about made for TV products" Mays found dead in his home. The only "normal" pieces of news were continuing protests in Iran and the House passing a watered-down cap-and-trade bill. I wonder what next week will bring.

question

Is it wrong to that I have SNL's Andy Sandberg's "I ran" music video stuck in my head ever since the protests started on June 12?

I wrote that this morning before we learned of Stanford's year long affair with an Argentine.

Stanford's whereabouts are answered...sort of. A reporter for SC's big paper, the State, cornered him getting off a plane from Argentina. So either he lied to his staff, or they lied to us about the whole hiking in the Appalachians thing. I think the former is worse.

When asked what the hell he was doing in Argentina for 5 days without telling his staff, the LG (or transferring power), let alone his wife and kids, Stanford said he walked along the coast. Only where he went (Buenos Aries) is along a river, not the ocean.

The story of where's Mark Sanford got stranger. The governor's staff settled on the story that we was "hiking on the Appalachian Trail," which is sure to become an internet euphemism. The story seems wrapped up. Except for that nagging tid bit about Sanford's cell phone's last whereabouts was in Atlanta, which is 80 miles from the trail.

The word surfaced that the SC star car Stanford took was at the Atlanta airport and a federal agent saw him boarding a plane there too. Where was he going?

Meanwhile, when asked if she had heard from her husband, Jenny Stanford said she was "busy being a mom" and no. Sounds like someone is pissed.

This story just get stranger all the time with more questions than answers. Stay tuned for the startling conclusion. I know I will.

priorities

Since last Thursday, South Carolina Governor (and Presidential aspirant) Mark Sanford has not been seen in public. That's odd, but odder still was this:

First lady Jenny Sanford told The Associated Press today her husband has been gone for several days and she doesn't know where he is.
...
Jenny Sanford said she was not concerned.

She said the governor said he needed time away from their children to write something.

Remember this weekend was Father's Day, an odd time to want to be away from your children.

So what did he write about while on sabbatical from his family and his job? From his Twitter account comes the following:

# SC's government structure fundamentally flawed http://www.postandcourier.c... #sctweets #gopabout 13 hours ago from web

#
stimulus discussion shows need for restructuring in SC - http://tinyurl.com/nr53wx #sctweets #tcot5:48 AM Jun 21st from web

What is he talking about?

Well the South Carolina Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Gov. Sanford had to stop posturing about the Stimulus Bill and take the money that the Legislature approved of taking (overriding Sanford's veto). Yes, the structure of South Carolina's government, with its popularly elected legislature overruling its popularly elected governor and having the appointed judiciary interpret the South Carolina Constitution and statutes, just like every other state in the country, is completely out of wack and needs restructuring.

Or maybe the Governor needs a vacation from his vacation. Maybe running away from your staff, security detail, your wife and children on Father's Day weekend and not telling anyone where you are so you can go off and tweet about how bummed you are that the other branches of state government think you are out to lunch isn't a great idea.


But hey, I am not a leading candidate for the GOP nomination for president in 2012, what do I know.

on the unfolding revolution in Iran

Sixteen days ago I was commenting on the twentieth anniversary of Tienanmen Square. I said that "[T]he world will change again, but when?"

Turns out, last Friday was the answer. The people of Iran were shocked that their government would so blatantly overturn their will for the election of president. If leaked results from the Interior Minitry are to believed, then

Mr Mousavi had won 19.1 million votes while Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won only 5.7 million.

The two other candidates, reformist Mehdi Karoubi and hardliner Mohsen Rezai, won 13.4 million and 3.7 million respectively.

A far cry from the landslide 63-30 official results for Ahmadinejad over Mousavi. But the people of Iran, half of whom are my age (30) or younger knew that the official results were a sham.

They have organized using online tools, and have kept the world informed via Twitter, YouTube and listsrvs. The videos and pictures and tweets coming out of the "Islamic Republic" show a brave people facing down thuggish government directed goons who delight in beating to death men and women for merely protesting.

The world watches with its heart in its throat. We pray for the Iranians to have their voices heard, for the police forces to put their batons down, and for the election to be annulled. While we sit comfortably thousands of miles wishing we could help. But we are neither as brave or as able to lend a hand because the government would like nothing more than to claim this organic uprising to be the product of a Western plot.

Like Obama, Mousavi is a vessel that these young Iranians have poured their hopes and dreams into. Now they are going to have to fight for their dreams on the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities, and on the internet. Mousavi and Obama are but men, but the ideas of the revolution of 2009 cannot be beaten away or tear gased out of existence. Governing through fear only lasts so long. The people of Iran overthrew a government 30 years ago, we just might be watching them do it again.

Jim, please decide

Jumping the gun, the Desert News ran with the headline "Utah Governor Gary Herbert questions whether climate change debate is 'over'." This might lead you believe that a) Gary Herbert is governor already not Lt. Gov. who is supposed to be governor any day now b) that Herbert sides with the thousands of scientific studies that confirm that our climate in rapidly changing and warming and that the cause is (at least to some degree) human activity. But you would be wrong on both counts.

"I've heard people argue on both sides of the issue, people I have a high regard for," Herbert said. "People says man's impact is minimal, if at all, so it appears to me the science is not necessarily conclusive."

This is GOP code for "I don't want to hear the bad news that hurts my friends in the polluting industries." Case in point comes a few sentences later in the article.

"What are we doing to bring people together? Is there a hidden agenda out there?" Herbert asked. "Help me understand the science."

He had stepped out of the discussion during a presentation by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu on the latest research. "The indications are not only that the climate is changing but is changing more than what were thought to be doom and gloom predictions," Chu said, warning the future could be bleak.

Actually it is the governor-in-waiting, not the science, that is still out. Dr. Steven Chu is not just the Secretary of Energy but a Physicist and knows what he is talking about. Herbert, on the other hand is willfully ignorant.

The reason the Western Governor's Association is even talking about climate change while they are here in Utah is because of Govs. Huntsman and Schwarzenegger. Which brings me to the title of this post.

Jim Matheson has been toying with the idea of running for Senate because he might face some loony or AG Mark Shurtleff and not incumbent Bob Bennett. And even if he isn't, Harry Reid probably has been calling him repeatedly to convince him to run. He has probably also been thinking about running for governor since Herbert is become less and less of an incumbent with each passing day that Obama dithers with sending his nomination to the Senate. I am sure it is no fun to be a moderate Democrat when folks in the leadership is yelling at you to get out of the way and vote more liberally than you are inclined to, given your district.

Plus as governor, Matheson would actually get to do something. And instead of being 1 of 100 senators, you get to be 1 of 50 governors, and go toe to toe with those lovely folks up on Utah's Capitol Hill.

But really, Mr. Matheson, we Democrats need you to decide to have a fighting chance at any of the three offices you are considering. 2010 is not too far away and money needs to be raised. If you decide not to run for governor, then everyone focus on pushing SL Co. Mayor Peter Carroon to run rather than waiting to see what you do. And then people can go work for Sam Granato, knowing that you don't need their help. But if you do choose to run statewide, money and staffing will come out of the woodwork to help you. But please, the sooner the better.

VP Joe Biden (still sounds odd to me) toed up to the line about Iranian election fraud by saying he was "suspicious" ... The reformers need to do this themselves though (in order for the movement have credibility within Iran), with help from the outside world but not the US leading the charge. So it seems like Biden might have actually struck the right balance and not said to much...this new Joe Biden is going to take getting used to.

What were the old guard thinking by rigging the election results in Iran? People are rioting in the streets, the internet has been shut down and none of this is out of joy for Mr. A's "reelection". This regressive stunt will do more for reform than the inauguration of the actual winner would have.

buying a justice to buy justice

Two years ago, Justice Clarence Thomas visited my law school while I was in my Third Year and when asked what decision, if any, he regrets, he stated that Republican Party of Minnesota v. White was the case he said he regretted because he believes now that the elections of judges has gotten a bit unseemly.

Yet Justice Thomas voted with the other three extremely conservative justices that it was A-OK for a coal mine owner to spend $3 million to elect a new state supreme court judge (replacing another justice), who became the deciding vote in overturning a $51 million verdict against said coal mine company.

The other 5 members of the Court thought that this conflict of interest was grounds for mandatory recusal.

This marks the latest time that "umpire" Chief Justice Roberts has called a strike for the big corporation and a ball for the little guy (in this case, the owner of a smaller mining company had sued the bigger mining company for driving him out of business and won, so the big CEO drove a justice up for election out of business, calling him a child molester). In fact, Roberts so far has always voted in favor of the government or the big company. The worst was for Exxon Mobile.

And it also marks the latest time that Justice Thomas says one thing and rules crazy conservative another way. He is a nice man, but makes for a terrible justice.

It has been twenty years since the revolutions of 1989 ended in the brutal crackdown on peaceful protests in Tienamen Square. Sure, the Berlin Wall might have fallen a few months later, but the limits of the revolution were set. it is not unlike the pushback that happened after the tide of revolution that started in America reached the shores of Europe.

While the New World Order that George H. W. Bush promised in the wake of 1989 never happened, the world was indeed forever changed. But not how things were expected to change. The lack of the Soviet Union was a destabilizing force for two reasons: 1) countries imploded from Europe to Africa to Asia, allowing for civil wars, genocides, fundamentalism, tyrants, and terrorism; and 2) America's dominance turned to arrogance, culminating in George W. Bush's folly of opting to invade Iraq because he could.

The world will change again, but when?

I used to think the phrase "culture wars" was a phrase by the Pat Buchanan's of the world to rile up a portion of the American populous. But it appears that a smaller subset of that group took it literally and are at war with those they disagree with.

If you haven't heard, a doctor in Kansas who performed abortions despite being aggressively targeted by radical anti-abortion groups, the former attorney general and talking heads for decades was murdered on Sunday at his church.

The instigators, like Bill O'Reilly, refuse to apologize for demonizing the doctor and others like him. Is it really any surprise that one of their followers took it too far? Even if their conscience is clear, their hands remain dirty.

I love going to Starbucks in heavily Mormon areas (yes they do exist). They are so clean, new, fast, and uncrowded.

I have say for once the big papers have live up to their billing. The stories about the process of selecting Sotomayor have been very well researched and very interesting reading. The stories about what other attorneys think of heran and GOP oposition plans, however have been less than inspired.

I went to a target today that has crammed because of remodeling and it still felt better than a Wallmart. Those places sap my soul.

The tortured debate about torture has grown stale and tiresome. It is pretty obvious from the evidence that it does not work in the sense that you don't get reliable information from torturing people, just like it is obvious that there are US prisons that can handle the actual guilty people from Gitmo. Yet emotionally, it seems that torture is somehow justified and must work (just ask Jack Bauer)...and that it is scary to think of inviting Al Qeada onto American soil even if it is a supermax in the hinterland. Thanks to Dick Cheney, torture is now something like abortion, where you have an opinion and no one can seem to sway you and the other side must be not just wrong but immoral.