I Don't Blame McNamara

I don't blame Robert McNamara for the US failure in Vietnam, although he certainly played an important role in it. As Secretary of Defense, he was not powerful enough to lose a war single-handedly from the Pentagon. The real culprits were the presidents -- Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon -- the Congress, and the American public. McNamara was an official under orders, and he carried them out to the best of his ability. He was more like the generals who worked for Hitler; he could have been guilty of war crimes, but not for the overall conduct of the war. That his obituaries are not claiming that he was guilty of war crimes probably speaks well of his character. Today, we have wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that the country more or less ignores, but in which they have been quicker to perceive war crimes, particularly in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

I blame the country, the United States, rather than McNamara. Despite protests, the leadership of the country let the war go on. I think from some of the obituaries I read, more GIs died in Vietnam after McNamara left as Secretary than during his tenure. The NYT obit says "Half a million American soldiers went to war on his watch. More than 16,000 died; 42,000 more would fall in the seven years to come."

As long as the rich and connected -- Bush, Cheney, Clinton, Wall Street types -- could avoid fighting, they were content to let the war go on, but in order to cover their cowardice they reviled those who fought the war, whether McNamara in the Pentagon, or some poor private just out of high school. The criticism heaped on McNamara in his obituaries taints every soldier who fought in the war. I'd like to know more about how the Germans treated their low ranking veterans of World War II. Did the German soldiers experience more shame and hatred from their fellow citizens than Vietnam veterans did?

UK Foreign Secretary Miliband is Jewish

I was surprised while watching Fareed Zakaria's GPS on CNN to learn that British Foreign Secretary David Miliband is Jewish. About 19 minutes into the interview, he made a point of saying that he is an atheist, but that his grandparents and his parents went through the Holocaust. So, he's an ethnic Jew, if not a religious Jew. It's no big deal, except that it's another indication that Jews run a lot of the world.

It's not unusual. In the Bible, Jews were advisers to lots of gentile leaders, starting with Joseph advising the Egyptian Pharaohs on how to avoid their seven years of famine. Later, you have Daniel advising Persian King Darius, ironic in light of today's Israel/Iran tensions. My only question is whether Jews are more loyal to the countries where they live or to Israel. The only example I can think of in the Bible is Nehemiah, the king's cup bearer, who persuades the king to let him rebuild the wall around Jerusalem.

We have not had a Jewish President. It would be interesting to know whether Al Gore's picking Joe Lieberman to be his vice president helped or hurt his campaign. Certainly it looked odd for Lieberman to support John McCain in the last election. Some new book says that Henry Kissinger is responsible for America surviving the Watergate scandal. Kissinger certainly spent a lot of time working on Israeli issues, but, perhaps mistakenly, I think he was pretty even handed. I think he was committed to Israel's existence, but was willing to press Israel to make concessions to the rest of the world. Although Barak Obama is certainly not Jewish, he is surrounded by a lot of Jewish advisers, starting with Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers, whom I find suspect. For some reason I have no qualms about Paul Volker or Ben Bernanke, who for some reason I consider totally American, even more trustworthy than Kissinger.

China Raises Fuel Prices

The FT reports that China has raised fuel prices across the board. Gas is now more expensive in China (about $3 per gallon) than it is in the US. What does it say about the US, when a developing country under recessionary pressures, like China, increases gas prices, while a rich country like the US keeps them low? Europe has kept gas prices high for years by adding taxes of various kinds.

Tom Friedman among many others has been calling for higher gas prices in order to promote other, greener forms of energy, but without success. When gas prices went much higher last summer, although they were still low compared to Europe, it was because of manipulation of the financial market, according to Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, not because of any intelligent policy decision.

It looks like the US could at least pursue a policy as sensible as the Chinese, although our policies appear to be controlled by oil and gas and financial interests who are only interested in boosting their profits, not by our national interest.

Elliott Abrams as Ghost and in Person

Elliott Abrams' return to op-ed pages has given me fits. See his WSJ and NYT op-eds. Now the ghost of Iran-Contra is back, although Abrams has now moved from Latin American issues to his real love, Middle East issues, where he is lobbying hard for Israel.

I don't know how Abrams happened to start in Latin America. I'm guessing he got his job as Assistant Secretary for Latin America at the State Department through the connections of his wife's father, Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, the influential Jewish magazine. I'm guessing Abrams would rather have worked on the Middle East then, but Reagan (or maybe George Shultz) was unwilling to give him that important a job. Thus, he ended up with Latin America, where his main job was to assure that the US pursued a very conservative agenda. Those were the days when the Reagan Administration greatly feared that it was going to be invaded by El Salvador or Nicaragua.

It was Abrams' efforts to shore up right-wing governments in Central America, like the military coup that just took power in Honduras, that led to his involvement in Iran-Contra. It is ironic that Iran and a Central American coup share the top of the news cycle twenty years later. I think things are better in both places, but they still have a long way to go, especially in Iran. I'm not optimistic that significant changes are going to be implemented in Iran as a result of the recent protests. Thinking is changing there, but it will take a long time to bring any concrete changes to fruition, and there is a possibility that things could get worse. There is a lot of talk that on the authoritarian side in Iran, the leadership has moved from being dominated by clerics to being dominated by the military. And the military is back in power in Honduras. The more things change the more they stay the same.

On "Morning Joe" this morning, Mike Barnacle kept asking guests whether the withdrawal of US troops from Iraqi cities meant that a new government that is Saddam-lite might be taking over. The main response seemed to be, "Not now, but who knows what will happen in a few years." Of course, one of the main effects of the US invasion of Iraq has been the strengthening of Iranian influence there. Fareed Zakaria mentioned last Sunday that nobody was paying attention to what Iranian cleric Sistani was doing in Iraq, where he is currently living in Najaf.

Abrams' job as Israeli spokesman and lobbyist is, of course, to do all he can to get the Obama Administration to beat Iran about the head and shoulders.