McNamara v. Rumsfeld: the dark side of Sec Def chic

An interesting column by Bob Herbert in today's Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/opinion/07herbert.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

Which led me to muse: Rumsfeld v. McNamara. The comparisons are obvious. Whether one picks policy positions, relationship to industry, hair or eyeglasses -- one looks at Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld and could be forgiven for thinking that the make-or-break qualification for Sec Def is to have tiny glasses, slicked-back hair and a smirk. If there is such a thing as "I'm smarter than you and I know it" chic, they embody it.

More serious, though, is the question of their relative legacies. I'm going to make a wild prediction and assert that both men will be judged by history, more than anything else, for their decisions to execute the Vietnam, Afganistan and Iraq wars. And this is fair, I think; both men shared during the height of each conflict a nearly identical affliction of hubris and did not mind -- in fact, demanded -- that they be held to account for the results.

So let's take a look at the numbers: McNamara, if one is to take him at his word in the early '60s, asserted that he was proud to be associated with the Vietnam War. So how many lives is he responsible for? According to the National Archives, there were 58,209 service men and women killed in the war, 303,635 wounded in action, and 1,948 MIA.

As for Rumsfeld, if we count both the Afganistan and Iraq theaters of combat, the current statistics (c. 6/24/09) are: in Iraq, 4, 316 dead and approximately 31,000 wounded American servicemen and women; in Afganistan, the number of coalition dead are over 1,200 (I had some difficulty coming up with an accurate number), and over 3,000 wounded.

Note that neither of these counts include the casualties of the "enemy," nor of the toll of these conflicts on the civilian populations in which they unfolded.

This is a crude way of analyzing the conflicts, admittedly. So what about a more theoretical comparison? I frankly am not interested in getting into a discussion of the "value" of each conflict, but I will make this assertion: each of these wars were undertaken based upon the presumption that the use of the American military -- whether its members were volunteers or draftees -- was the best possible solution for the political issues at hand. Translated: the architects of each conflict accepted the premise that the inevitable deaths of thousands of Americans -- and hundreds of thousands of others -- was an acceptable exchange for the political goals that would be accomplished by the success of the venture.

And there's the rub. Vietnam, most (sane) people would agree, was an unmitigated disaster. Wrong in its founding assumptions, wrong in its execution, wrong in its conclusion. It arguably brought down a president, and without doubt plunged the US into a morass of domestic strife from which we still have not fully recovered.

As far as Iraq is concerned, I would say the jury's still out on whether the political goals (depending on how you define them) are moving towards success. Being a pessimist, I sense that only time will tell what the result was, but at best it will never be unambiguous, and the worst (but, I'm afraid, more likely) case scenario is that no stable, self-sustaining democracy will emerge out of the rubble. I very much doubt that even if one does, it will be a democracy that is very friendly to our interests. I certainly hope I'm wrong about this.

Afganistan is an even greater problem. The idea of a sustainable democracy there is, to be quite brutal, neither possible nor, given the ability of the various, rather dubious parties to assert their will over an often frightened public, necessarily desirable.

So thus unfolds the ethics of high-level decision making: by their own standards, both Rumsfeld and McNamara failed -- in both cases, spectacularly. And to take this a step further, the failures of both have profoundly changed not just the geopolitical reality of the regions of their adventures, but American culture in general. (Ironically, it was McNamara's failure in Vietnam that, arguably, allowed for the possibility of Rumsfeld's from a domestic perspective: had McNamara not so discredited the military in the eyes of the American population, we might still well have a draft. Rumsfeld's hand in dispatching a "volunteer army" might not have been so free were he accountable to a public forced to send its sons and daughters to Iraq.)

In the end, though, I think the most complex legacy of both is their own response to failure. McNamara, famously, repudiated his decisions. That might have been admirable if he had done so in a truly contrite way, but instead, staying true to his "I know more than you do" form, he did so in a best-selling apologetic, laying the blame on everyone he could, ultimately ending in a preachy diatribe. One senses he STILL thought he could do a better job as SecDef, if given another chance.

Rumsfeld, on the other hand, has never admitted in any way that any decision he made might have even been a little off the mark, save disastrous. Should we expect an "In Retrospect" version 2.1 down the road? I'm not holding my breath.

Say what you will, but I don't even think contrition, even the most sincere, could ever make up for one fundamental quality missing from each man's character. I'm not sure what to call it -- empathy? modesty? -- but I do know its antonym: hubris.

What I wouldn't give for a leader, at these crucial moments, who took a moment to reflect on the possibility that maybe, just maybe, he ISN'T the smartest guy in the room -- tiny glasses notwithstanding.