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Today's
Stories
March 1, 2004
Heather Williams
Haiti as Target Practice: How
the US Press Missed the Story
February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
February 27, 2004
Thomas C. Mountain
A
White Jesus During Black History Month?
Laura Carlsen
Americans
Abroad: Bush is Persona Non Grata
John B. Anderson
Nader's Campaign Brings Back Memories: Creating an Open Electoral
Process
Jason Leopold
Spying
on Kofi Annan
John Chuckman
Nader,
Risk and Hope
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Putin's Russia
Ray McGovern
Punished
for Honest Intelligence
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
Website of the Day
Bush: Why I'm Running for Re-election
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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for More Stories.
|
March
1, 2004
Morris and McNamara
Oscar
Winning Director Thanks War Criminal Before Audience of Billions
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
To no one's surprise, Errol Morris won an Oscar
for his documentary on Robert McNamara, The Fog of War. In front
of a world audience in the billions Morris thanked the mass murderer
for his cooperation. Earlier this year I wrote some fierce criticisms
of Morris's awful film, which will appear in CounterPunch's Book
of Monsters: America's Willing Executioners, scheduled for
publication at the end of this year. (You have a favorite monster?
Write us!) Here's what I wrote, which now includes some more
recent reflections on JFK's so-called secret plan to withdraw.
My dear friend Andrew Kopkind liked to
tell how, skiing in Aspen at the height of the Vietnam War, he
came round a bend and saw another skier, Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara, alone near the edge of a precipice. This was during
the period of Rolling Thunder, which ultimately saw three times
as many bombs dropped on Vietnam as the Allies dropped on Europe
in the Second World War. "I could have reached out with
my ski pole," Andy would say wistfully, "and pushed
him over."
Alas, Andy shirked this chance to get
into the history books and McNamara survived the 1960s, when
he contributed more than most to the slaughter of 3.4 million
Vietnamese (his own estimate). He went on to run the World Bank,
where he presided over the impoverishment, eviction from their
lands and death of many millions more round the world. And now
here he is, the star of Errol Morris's much- praised, in my view
wildly over-praised, documentary The Fog of War, talking comfortably
about the millions of people he's helped to kill.
It reminds me of films of Albert Speer,
Hitler's architect and then head of war production. Speer loved
to admit to an overall guilt. But when he was pressed on specific
nastiness, like working Jews or Russians to death in arms factories,
he would insist, eyes ablaze with forthrightness, that he knew
nothing of such infamies.
It's good to have a new generation reminded
of history's broad outlines, like the firebombing of Japanese
cities and Vietnam, but even here McNamara's recollection--surprising
to many--of his role in advising Curtis LeMay to order his bombers
to fly at lower altitude, the more effectively to incinerate
Japanese cities, goes unexamined.
Did the young McNamara, admittedly a
lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, really play such a role?
Michael Sherry, Professor of History at Northwestern University,
author of The
Rise of American Air Power, has this to say:
"I did extensive research in the
late 1970s and 1980s on the American bombing of Japan, and especially
on LeMay's decision to fly in at lower altitudes. I do not recall
that McNamara's name ever popped up in those records, and since
McNamara's was a famous name by then, I wouldn't have ignored
it. Nor was McNamara mentioned in the several hours of interviewing
I did with LeMay. While not denigrating his [i.e. McNamara's]wartime
record, I suspect there is some latter- day expansion of the
importance of his wartime role--that not uncommon tendency of
old soldiers to inflate the past. In this case, there may also
be a familiar theme at work that surfaced, sometimes in ugly
conflict, in McNamara's tenure as defense secretary--the superiority
of civilian expertise over military wisdom; perhaps McNamara
is figuratively writing that theme back into his story of World
War II... In any event,doubt LeMay saw McNamara as a major figure
in his decision- making, and LeMay's resort to firebombing was
the product of several factors(including pressure from Washington,
and simply the apparent failure of other efforts to do much)),
not simply of the technical advice he received."
The documentary's gimmickry--cuts to
black, Morris shouting his questions away from the mike, McNamara
off- center in the frame, montage of typewriter- ribbon wheels,
skulls dropping in slow motion down a stairwell, captions offering
very banal "lessons"--gives us a clue.
Morris didn't have much to throw at McNamara.
He didn't do enough homework, and it's no substitute to say he's
evolved a technique whereby we can look into McNamara's eyes.
We can look into the eyes of anyone on remote camera on the Koppel
Show. So what?
Time and again, McNamara gets away with
it, cowering in the shadow of baroque monsters like Curtis LeMay
or LBJ, choking up about his choice of Kennedy's gravesite in
Arlington, sniffling at the memory of Johnson giving him the
Medal of Freedom, spouting nonsense about how Kennedy would have
pulled out of Vietnam, muffling himself in the ever- useful camouflage
of the "fog of war."
Now, the "fog of war" is a
tag usually attributed to von Clausewitz, though the great German
philosopher and theorist of war never actually used the phrase.
Eugenia Kiesling argued a couple of years ago in Military Review
that the idea of fog--unreliable information--wasn't a central
preoccupation of Clausewitz. "Eliminating fog", Kiesling
wrote, "gives us a clearer and more useful understanding
of Clausewitz's friction. It restores uncertainty and the intangible
stresses of military command to their rightful centrality in
'On War'. It allows us to replace the simplistic message that
war intelligence is important with the reminder that Clausewitz
constantly emphasizes moral forces in war."
As presented by McNamara, through Morris,
"the fog of war" usefully deflects attention from clear
and unpleasant facts entirely unobscured by fog. McNamara can
talk--I'll come to the Gulf of Tonkin incident shortly--about
confusions, fog, about what actually happened on August 2 or
4, 1964, thus detouring unfogged daylight, of which there was
plenty, about the moral failures of US commanders including McNamara,
waging war on the Vietnamese.
Roberta Wohlstetter was a pioneer in
this fogging technique back in the 1950s with her heavily subsidized
Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, which deployed the idea of
distracting "noise" as the phenomenon that prevented
US commanders, ultimately Roosevelt, from comprehending the information
that the Japanese were about to launch a surprise attack. Wohlstetterian
"noise" thus obscured the fact that FDR wanted a Japanese
provocation, knew the attack was coming, though not probable
not its scale and destructiveness.
When McNamara looks back down memory
lane there are no real shadows, just the sunlight of moral self-satisfaction:
"I don't fault Truman for dropping the bomb"; "I
never saw Kennedy more shocked" (after the murder of Ngo
Dinh Diem); "never would I have authorized an illegal action"
(after the Tonkin Gulf fakery); "I'm very proud of my accomplishments
and I'm very sorry I made errors" (his life). Slabs of instructive
history are missing from Morris's film. McNamara rode into the
Pentagon on one of the biggest of big lies, the bogus "missile
gap" touted by Kennedy in his 1960 campaign against Nixon.
It was all nonsense. As Defense Secretary McNamara ordered the
production of 1,000 Minuteman strategic nukes, this at a time
when he was looking at US intelligence reports showing that the
Soviets had one silo with one untested missile.
To Morris now he offers homilies about
the menace of nuclear Armageddon. It's cost-free to say to say
such things, grazing peacefully on the tranquil mountain pastures
of his 87 years. Why did Morris not try to extort from McNamara,
in those twenty- three hours of interviews, some reflections
on how people in their forties, on active service in the belly
of the beast, should behave. Would McNamara encourage today's
weapons designers in Los Alamos to mutiny, to resign? Were the
atom spies in Los Alamos in the 1940s right to try to level nuclear
terror to some sort of balance? How does McNamara regard the
Berrigans and their comrades who served or are serving decades
in prison for physically attacking nuclear missiles, beating
the decks of the Sea Wolf nuclear submarine with their hammers.
Even when McNamara's record shows to
his credit, no useful point is made. Ralph Nader tells me (and
wrote it in Unsafe at Any Speed) that it's true that when he
was head of the Ford Division of the Ford Motor Company in the
mid- 1950s, McNamara did push for safety options--seat belts
and padded instrument panels. Ford dealer brochures for the '56
models featured photos of how Ford and GM models fared in actual
crashes, to GM's disadvantage. But Morris could have put to McNamara
what happened next. As Nader describes it, in December, 1955,
a top GM executive called Ford's vice president for sales and
said Ford's safety campaign had to stop. These Ford executives,
many of them formerly from GM, had a saying, Chevy could drop
its price $25 to bankrupt Chrysler, $50 to bankrupt Ford. Ford
ran up the white flag. The safety sales campaign stopped. McNamara
took a long vacation in Florida, his career in Detroit in the
balance, and came back a team player. Safety went through the
windscreen and lay in a coma for years. None of this bloody corporate
handiwork shows up in the documentary, which opts for that showy
footage of skulls being dropped down stairwells as part of safety-
impact studies. McNamara invokes the Ford Falcon--you can still
see some of them bumbling around in the South--as his effort
to push small cheap cars, and of course this claim goes unexamined
too. The US car companies put out small cars in the late fifties
mostly to instruct US consumers that small cars weren't worth
buying (except for the immortal Slant 6 Plymouth Valiant, rolled
out in 1960 by Chrysler, run by engineers, and maybe the Nash
Rambler), as opposed to the larger vehicles which was what the
companies were interested in making money off. The Japanese and
Germans came in with well- made small cars and, helped by Nader's
attack on the Corvair (which was actually a pretty good car)
captured that market, just as they wiped out the UK's poorly
managed MG and Triumph in the Forties.
The eyes don't tell the story. McNamara
is self-serving and disingenuous. Reminiscing about his acceptance
of Kennedy's invitation to come from Ford in Detroit to Camelot,
McNamara claims to Morris that he insisted he would not be part
of Georgetown's pesky social round. Nonsense. He took to it like
a parvenu to ermine, as more than one Washington hostess could
glowingly recall. "It's beyond the capacity of the human
mind to comprehend all the variables," the systems analyst
proclaims to Morris, which would have afforded a better- informed
filmmaker a chance to ask this cold engine of statistical calculation
for his take on the prime business of the Pentagon, the allocation
of pork.
Why did Defense Secretary McNamara overrule
all expert review and procurement recommendations and insist
that General Dynamics rather than Boeing make the disastrous
F-111, at that time one of the largest procurement contracts
in the Pentagon's history? Could it be that Henry Crown of Chicago
was calling in some chits for his role in fixing the 1960 JFK
vote in Cook County, Illinois? Crown, of Chicago Sand and Gravel,
had $300 million of the mob's money in GD debentures, and after
the disaster of the Convair, GD needed the F-111 to avoid going
belly- up, taking the mob's $300 million with it. McNamara misled
Congressional investigators about this for years afterward.
As noted above, McNamara lays great stress
on JFK's "shock", just a few weeks before he himself
was killed, at the assassination of South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh
Diem and his brother. He also promotes the view that Kennedy
was planning to withdraw from Vietnam.
Now, McNamara has been a career "front
man" for the Kennedys, called even to Chappaquiddick to
help Ted Kennedy figure out what to say about it. But as Professor
Fred Thayer, (formerly of the University of Pittsburg and before
that was a Air Force colonel working in under McNamara in the
Pentagon in the early 1960s) reminds me,
"Far too many people, including
pundits, have ignored the key sequence of events, and it is still
important: The Kennedy administration approved the Vietnam coup
(pushed by Lodge) that killed Diem early in November 1963. This
"regime change" deeply committed the US to a 'nation-building
exercise' and the maintenance of security there until it could
be done. LBJ, a personal emissary from JFK to Diem, probably
would have argued against this casual approval (done over a weekend
with high level consideration). Tapes have since shown (LBJ and
Senator Russell) that LBJ knew very early that he was 'stuck'
and did not Know what to do about it. McNamara (never very familiar
with lots of things going on) may or may not be playing the old
Kennedy game of shifting blame to LBJ. I suggest that this "regime
change" set the stage for expansion, just as the not-thought-through
"regime change" in Iraq is not working very well today.
"It takes a very simple analysis
of international politics to understand that when the US supported
a coup in South Vietnam (Kennedy may not have known of the final
decision, but Lodge was his personal agent), and when that coup
not only deposed Diem but killed him, that all bets were off.
The reason JFK was "shocked" (as McNamara says) may
be because JFK knew that the killing of Diem erased all previous
decisions, or merely that JFK was not up-to-date (common in the
absence of decision processes in those years).
"Once Diem was killed during a coup
we supported, all previous decisions became meaningless. My personal
analysis is that the 'plan to withdraw' [not a 'secret decision'
but announced by press secretary Pierre Salinger and printed
in the New York Times on October 3, 1963] was merely a public
relations ploy because forces in Vietnam increased 1700% in the
Kennedy years. Whatever JFK may have dreamed about in September/October,
however, meant nothing after Diem was killed just a week or two
before JFK was killed.
"[McNamara remains ] blissfully
ignorant of the new realities when Diem was killed. Effectively,
we became an 'occupying authority' with the responsibility to
stay there as a new nation was built. We went through the whole
exercise--constitutional assembly, writing, ratification, new
elections, etc. This took a long time, and we are now discovering
that we cannot 'shortcut' that process in Iraq. We never solved
[that] in Vietnam because we were trying to establish SVN as
a separate entity, after shutting off elections in the 1950s
because they would have elected Communists. "It is almost
as though McNamara refuses to acknowledge that Diem was killed
during a US-supported coup, and I do not write this with any
praise of Diem. I do not doubt that JFK 'hoped' to withdraw some
troops by the end of the 1963, a sort of minor version of MacArthur's
promises in Korea in 1950. Christmas is always a popular season
for such promises. It's all simple; when we became involved in
killing Diem, all bets were off. I don't think McNamara understood
the significance of these things."
The Gulf of Tonkin "attack"
prompted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, whereby Congress
gave LBJ legal authority to prosecute and escalate the war in
Vietnam. McNamara does some fancy footwork here, stating that
there wasn't any attack by North Vietnamese PT boats on the US
destroyer Maddox on August 4, but that there had been such an
attack on August 2.
In fact I.F. Stone offered a remarkably
accurate account of what really happened in the edition of his
Weekly dated August 24, 1964. It shouldn't have been beyond Morris's
powers to pull up that, or a piece by Robert Scheer, published
in the Los Angeles Times in April, 1985, establishing not only
that the Maddox was attacked neither on August 2 nor 4 but that,
beginning on the night of July 30, South Vietnamese navy personnel,
US- trained and--equipped, "had begun conducting secret
raids on targets in North Vietnam."
As Stone wrote at the time, the North
Vietnamese PT boats that approached the Maddox on August 2 were
probably responding to that assault. The Six- Day War? Just before
this '67 war the Israelis were ready to attack and knew they
were going to win but couldn't get a clear go- ahead from the
Johnson Administration. As the BBC documentary The 50 Years War
narrates, Meir Amit, head of Israel's Mossad, flew to Washington.
The crucial OK came from McNamara, thus launching Israel's long-
planned, aggressive war on Egypt, Jordan and Syria, which led
to present disasters. And no, Morris didn't quiz McNamara on
Israel's deliberate attack on the US ship Liberty during that
war (with thirty-four US sailors dead and 174 wounded), or on
the cover- up that McNamara supervised.
Apparently to Robert McNamara's mortification,
Errol Morris passes over his subject's 13- year stint running
the World Bank, whither he was dispatched by LBJ, Medal of Freedom
in hand. McNamara brandishes 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 con straints
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.
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.
Back in 1994 I had a conversation with
Noam Chomsky, (you can find it in my memoir The
Golden Age Is In Us ) where McNamara's name cropped up. "If
you look at the modern intelligentsia over the past century or
so", Chomsky said, "they're pretty much a managerial
class, a secular priesthood. They've gone in basically two directions.
One is essentially Leninist. Leninism is the ideology of a radical
intelligentsia that says, We have the right to rule. Alternatively,
they have joined the decision-making sector of state capitalist
society, as managers in the in the political, economic and ideological
institutions. The ideologies are very similar. I've sometimes
compared Robert McNamara to Lenin, and you only have to change
a few words for them to say virtually the same thing." True
enough.
"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." Substitute "party organization"
for "management" and you have Lenin. From "democratic
centralism" to bureaucratic centralism. 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.
A displayed by Morris, McNamara never
offers any reflection on the social system that produced and
promoted him, a perfectly nice, well- spoken war criminal. As
his inflation of his role in the foe- bombing of Japan shows,
he can go so far as to falsely though complacently indict himself,
while still shirking bigger, more terrifying and certainly more
useful reflections on the system that blessed him and mercilessly
killed millions upon millions under FDR, Truman, Eisenhower,
JFK, LBJ, Nixon.
I don't think Morris laid a glove on
McNamara, who should be feeling well pleased. Like Speer, he
got away with it yet again. We have so many sponsors of mass
murder hanging around, it would be nice to see one of them, once
in a while, take a real pasting. But no, they live on into happy
old age, vivid in their worries about the human condition, writing
in The New York Review of Books, passing on no honest records
about the evil it really takes to run an empire.
So suddenly people are shocked about
a relative piker like George W. Bush and start talking about
Hitler. If only they knew. It's not that hard to find out. In
the weeks after Errol Morris's film was launched McNamara scurried
to Washington to participate in forums on the menace of nuclear
destruction with the same self assurance that he went to Vietnam
and Cuba to review the record. He and Morris later participated
in a dog and pony show at the Zellerbach auditorium at UC Berkeley.
Now's there's the Oscar hoopla. "Condemned out of his own
mouth" indeed! If Morris had done a decent job, McNamara
would not dare to appear in any public place. It's as though
Eichmann started going on the lecture circuits with a couple
of Holocaust survivors.
Weekend
Edition Features for February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
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