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Thursday, July 9, 2009

McNamara’s Sorrow And Our Good Conscience by Norman Birnbaum

McNamara’s Sorrow And Our Good Conscience

Norman Birnbaum

Had John Kennedy lived, he would now be ninety-one. The death of his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, at ninety-three reminds us of the Kennedy years with their agitated contradictions. Not Kennedy but Eisenhower initiated the American involvement in Viet-Nam. Kennedy enlarged the engagement, then had second thoughts----and was murdered before he could change course, perhaps because he was planning to do so. Older statesmen like Eisenhower presided over the great expansion of American influence and power which is now ending, younger ones who had served in the Second World War like Kennedy and McNamara regarded themselves as heirs with a special responsibility to increase the family estate.

Lyndon Johnson, who McNamara served as faithfully as he had Kennedy, connected the generations. A protégé of Franklin Roosevelt, he was a New Dealer and an ambitious and successful domestic social reformer before first marching into adventure, then stumbling into disaster, in Asia. That disaster occurred as the nation was in a period of great domestic turmoil. The Afro-American Civil Rights movement, the revolt in schools and universities, the women’s movement, joined in the protest at the war. Paradoxically, it was a racially integrated army (if one riven by racial tensions) which was sent by a very prosperous nation (which had also begun what was called a war on its own poverty) to eradicate Viet-Nam’s revolutionary nationalism. When Johnson realized that it could not be stopped, he fell into the depression that impelled him to abandon the Presidency.He later said that had he withdrawn from Viet-Nam, he would have had to sacrifice his domestic program.

The bargain which led the social reformers to espouse American empire, long before Johnson’s agonies, was heartfelt. The reformers actually believed in an American mission to redeem the world---in which progress within our borders legitimated our efforts (sometimes, unfortunately, misunderstood) to liberate others from both revolutionary illusions and traditionalist backwardness. The foundations and universities from which Kennedy recruited his advisors, and which also supplied ideas and persons to his cabinet officials and to the Congress, had an American view of contemporary history. It was the great stage for the drama of “modernization,” in which any nation given the chance would choose to advance to the level of the United States. Amongst the attributes of “modernization” so congenial to the McNamara generation was an American version of Napoleon’s idea of a “carriere ouvert aux talents”----with the French Revolution and its successor regimes totally unmentioned.

McNamara grew up in the Great Depression in modest circumstances. He studied not at Harvard like the wealthy Kennedy but at the great public university in Berkeley, California---and acknowledged that his own ascent was made possible by the nineteenth century American ideas of social opportunity institutionalized in the public universities. His own turn to social reform came only after Johnson dismissed him as Secretary of Defense (for finally telling him to end an unwinnable war) and sent him as President to the World Bank. There, he conducted a vigorous campaign against global poverty, and espoused, before many others, environmental sanity. : McNamara’s early career as a professor at Harvard Business School and then at Ford Motor Company, where he became President, was brilliant but politically conventional. In the Air Force during the war, he had participated in the planning of the fire bombing of Japan. In fact, he identified himself with the technological rationality, the reliance on measurement, which was a major instrument of American progressivism. Progress consisted of the relentless reinvention of the world---which is why so many Americans seeking social improvement were attracted to the doctrine of a universal process of “modernization.”.When McNamara moved from the Pentagon to the World Bank, he long maintained the same intellectual schema.

Readers of Max Weber’s portrayal of the Calvinists can recognize in McNamara a latter day Puritan, a disciplined and relentless servant of the Lord’s will. He was for a while active in his church,. the major American Calvinist group, the Presbyterians. Like every American church, it was bitterly divided by the Vietnam war. For whatever reason, McNamara’s public attachment to his church diminished. McNamara in 1995, twenty years after the American expulsion from Vietnam and twenty-seven years after he left the Pentagon, published “In Retrospect: The Tragedy And Lessons of Vietnam.”

As a rare acknowledgement of responsibility for error and disaster by a major historical figure, it is exceptional. He exposed himself to the judgment of his contemporaries in an act of contrition in the traditions of Puritan moral doubt. Many responded harshly. What self-criticism by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are we to hear? Our harshness might be tempered. McNamara’s work at the World Bank, where he assigned Willy Brandt his famed report on global inequality, was itself a kind of reparation. Then McNamara appeared in the 2002 dcumentary film, “The Fog Of War”----and criticised the unilateralism of the Iraq War. Before that, on issues of arms control and nuclear weaponry, he had championed negotiations to avert the possibility of the use of nuclear arms. As Secretary of Defense, indeed, he was an indispensable ally of Kennedy in his determination to wrest control of nuclear weapons from our belligerent generals. During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 he helped Kennedy avert catastrophe.

The obituaries of McNamara, inevitably, are ambivalent. His early arrogance and blindness were not unique, they were shared by much of our elite. Arriving at the top of our society by talent and work, McNamara and his colleagues supposed that the experiences of others had few lessons for themselves. A new generation of careerists and idealists (sometimes, the same persons) is at the White House. They have not taken command of our dysfunctional system of government—but propose to solve, as in Afghanistan, the problems of other peoples. Our President has surely read McNamara and is able to locate his own place in the one history Americans find it most difficult to grasp, our own. McNamara’s anguish will be rewarded, posthumously, if Obama were to take it seriously.

2 comments:

Michele Kearney said...

An argument that McNamara was an even bigger disaster for humanity at the World Bank.

McNamara had a 13-year stint running the World Bank, whither he was dispatched by LBJ, Medal of Freedom in hand. McNamara liked to brandish his Bank years as his moral redemption and all too often his claim is accepted by those who have no knowledge of the actual, ghastly record. In fact the McNamara of the World Bank evolved naturally, organically, from the McNamara of Vietnam. The one was prolegomenon to the other, the McNamara-sponsored horrors in Vietnam perhaps on a narrower and more vivid scale, but ultimately lesser in dimension and consequence. No worthwhile portrayal of McNamara could possibly avoid McNamara's performance at the World Bank because there, within the overall constraints of the capitalist system he served, he was his own man. There was no LeMay, no LBJ issuing orders. And as his own man, McNamara amplified the ghastly blunders, corruptions and lethal cruelties of American power as inflicted upon Vietnam to a planetary scale. The best terse account of the McNamara years is in Bruce Rich's excellent history of the Bank, Mortgaging the Earth, published in 1994.

When McNamara took over the Bank, "development" loans (which were already outstripped by repayments) stood at $953 million and when he left, at $12.4 billion, which, discounting inflation, amounted to slightly more than a 6- fold increase. Just as he multiplied the troops in Vietnam, he ballooned the Bank's staff from 1,574 to 5,201. The Bank's shadow lengthened steadily over the Third World. Forests, in the Amazon, in Cameroon, in Malaysia, in Thailand, fell under the axe of "modernization". Peasants were forced from their lands. Dictators like Pinochet and Ceausescu were nourished with loans.

From Vietnam to the planet: The language of American idealism and high purpose was just the same. McNamara blared his mission of high purpose in 1973 in Nairobi, initiating the World Bank's crusade on poverty. "The powerful have a moral obligation to assist the poor and the weak." The result was disaster, draped, as in Vietnam with obsessive secrecy, empty claims of success and mostly successful efforts to extinguish internal dissent. And as with Vietnam, McNamara's obsession with statistics, produced a situation, (according to S. Shaheed Husain, then the Bank's vice president in charge of Operations) where, "without knowing it, McNamara manufactured data. If there was a gap in the numbers, he would ask staff to fill it, and others made it up for him."

At McNamara's direction the Bank would prepare five year "master country lending plans", set forth in "country programming papers. "In some cases, Rich writes, "even ministers of a nation's cabinet could not obtain access to these documents, which in smaller, poor countries, were viewed as international decrees on their economic fate."

These same "decrees" were drawn up by technocrats (in Vietnam they were the "advisers") often on the basis of a few short weeks in the target country. Corruption seethed. Most aid vanished into the hands of local elites who very often used the money to steal the resources--pasture, forest, water, of the very poor whom the Bank was professedly seeking to help. In Vietnam, Agent Orange and napalm.

Across the third world, the Bank underwrote "Green Revolution" technologies that the poorest peasants couldn't afford and that drenched land in pesticides and fertilizer. Vast infrastructural projects such as dams and kindred irrigation projects once again drove the poor from their lands, from in Brazil to India. It was the malign parable of "modernization" written across the face of the third world, with one catatrophe after another catastrophes prompted by the destruction of traditional subsistence rural economies.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn07072009.html

Michele Kearney said...

The appropriation of smaller farms and common areas, Rich aptly comments, "resembled in some respects the enclosure of open lands in Britain prior to the Industrial Revolution--only this time on a global scale, intensified by Green Revolution agricultural technology." As an agent of methodical planetary destruction, McNamara should be ranked in the top tier of earth-wreckers of all time.

"Management", McNamara declared in 1967 "is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused through society." The managerial ideal for McNamara was managerial dictatorship. World Bank loans surged to Pinochet's Chile after Allende's overthrow, to Uruguay, to Argentina, to Brazil after the military coup, to the Philippines, to Suharto after the '65 coup in Indonesia.

And to the Romania of Ceausescu. McNamara poured money--$2.36 billion between 1974 and 1982--into the tyrant's hands. In 1980 Romania was the Bank's eighth biggest borrower. As McNamara crowed delightedly about his "faith in the financial morality of socialist countries" Ceausescu razed whole villages, turned hundreds of square miles of prime farm land into open- pit mines, polluted the air with coal and lignite, turned Rumania into one vast prison, applauded by the Bank in an amazing 1979 economic study as being a fine advertisement for the "Importance of Centralized Economic Control". Another section of that same 1979 report, titled "Development of Human Resources", featured these chilling words: "To improve the standards of living of the population as a beneficiary of the development process, the government has pursued policies to make better use of the population as a factor of production... An essential feature of the overall manpower policy has been ... to stimulate an increase in birth rates." Ceausescu forbade abortions, and cut off disrtribution of contraceptives. Result: ten of thousand of abandoned children, dumped in orphanages, another sacrificial hecatomb in McNamara's lethal hubris.