Oh yeah — the military doesn’t give a c**p either.

Faithful (and brilliant) co-admin scrahan posted this comment in response to my article on the DADT-foot dragging.  It’s a very good point, and one I failed to address yesterday. 

Tomate, I think I can make a stab at the (presumably rhetorical) question you posed at the end of this, “Why drag feet on DADT, when the majority of American’s accept the idea of openly gay servicemen and women?” In this case, it’s not whether the majority of American’s are comfortable with it; the question is, are the majority of military, or likely military personnel comfortable.

 I don’t have those numbers, but the conventional thinking (trans. pulling this from my ass and/or heard some homeless guy ranting about it on the sidewalk) is that those are the people who feel strongly about this issue, and would be offended to serve with openly gay servicemen. Is it a good argument? No, soldiers didn’t like blacks or women serving, and both are now integral (if not always, in the case of women, well-integrated. The DOD’s recent study on rape in the military is a pretty harrowing read) members of the military.

 But at least it is an argument, one I would love to see you shred to pieces. At your convenience, my good sir.

Gladly, my good sir.  Gladly.

Robert S. McNamara’s quest for forgiveness

Perhaps somewhat lost in the latest boom of celebrity deaths, was that of Robert S. McNamara, one of the principal architects of the Vietnam War, who died yesterday morning at age 93. McNamara was the Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and in many ways could be considered the Donald Rumsfeld of his day. Over the past twenty years, he has embarked on a mea culpa tour of sorts by agreeing with many of his former detractors that the war was not winnable and should probably never have been undertaken.

In 1995, McNamara wrote a memoir, “In Retrospect: the Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam”. One of the key lessons learned that McNamara details in the book (see clip below), was that Vietnam was at its core a civil war between North and South Vietnam and that “you can not win a civil war with outside troops”.

Perhaps he became such an advocate in the hope that American public officials would never make that mistake again. Point, set, match neocons, I guess.

Still, McNamara was a fascinating figure, and despite my disgust with his actions as Secretary of Defense, it was humbling to see a man, perhaps one of the most intelligent of his generation, come to grips with his own extreme failings. I can remember seeing the 2003 documentary, The Fog of War, as a college sophomore. It came out around the same time as the “shock and awe” phase of the Iraq War was beginning. Although I had heard many of McNamara’s Vietnam epiphanies before, they had never hit home in quite the same way. The transparent format of the interview segments also left an indelible impact on me that forever changed my view of the man.

This film included many segments where the viewer is forced to focus on McNamara’s face at a camera angle that makes the former Pentagon chief  look small and solemn in his thoughts. He had realized the error of his ways, and this documentary was his best shot at asking the world for forgiveness as he approached his own inevitable demise.

McNamara is now gone, but his lessons must live on. Perhaps I see him in a kinder light because I did not live through Vietnam myself. My internal bitterness towards his lies and misjudgments when he had power is naturally less than that of my parents’ generation.

Will I be able to feel this same sense of contemplative pity if Mr. Rumsfeld ever goes through a similar process? Perhaps not, though I hope he does, and I will just have to cross that bridge when I come to it.

The greatest lesson I can glean from McNamara’s life is that we are all to some degree prisoners of the times in which we live in, and that it was only once he stepped away from public life and sought a better understanding of what went wrong with Vietnam, that he was actually able to fairly analyze the situation. All too often our public officials seem stuck in the moment and unwilling to see that there is a gray area to so much in life, including international politics.

Robert McNamara’s life and times prove that an absolutist view of the world can cause immense, unecessary destruction. If our leaders could only learn from his legacy, perhaps McNamara’s decades long quest was not in vain.