McNamara: The Man who was Wrong

[deception]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/o...ing-america-into-the-vietnam-war-1734442.html

Mcnamara records deep doubts over the war as early as December 1965, when he warned Johnson there was at best only a 50 per cent chance that America could save South Vietnam by military means. By 23 June 1966 he was confiding to Averell Harriman, President Johnson's special ambassador, his belief that an "acceptable" military solution was not possible, and that a negotiated settlement was inevitable.

Not surprisingly, for McNamara the World Bank represented a place of atonement, where the developing world might be assisted rather than bombed into rubble. His tenure saw a large expansion in lending to the Third World – which later critics believed to have hastened the debt crises of the 1980s and 1990s. After he left the Bank in 1981, McNamara's voyage of redemption continued, as he became a leading advocate of nuclear disarmament and a largely rehabilitated pillar of the American establishment. But the questions remained: why and how did Vietnam happen?

But this was an age when the domino theory was all. The clever men around Kennedy believed that if South Vietnam fell, the Communists – like the Japanese 30 years earlier – would soon be at the gates of Australia and India. They couldn't understand until it was too late that Vietnam was a civil war, a colonial struggle for independence driven less by ideology than nationalism, and in which America had no business.

In his 1995 memoir In Retrospect McNamara finally offered his version of events, and acknowledged the huge mistakes which had been made. He showed how the "crucial incremental steps" toward heavier fighting had been taken by President Johnson and himself in late 1963 and 1964. But no one "had truly investigated what was essentially at stake and important to us," or properly examined the possibility of "other routes to our destination."