Does getting Iraq right offer absolution for getting Vietnam wrong?
Do admissions of errors ease the burden of those errors?
McNamara lived long enough to raise these questions.
History will answer them, perhaps unkindly.
But we ought not underestimate the significance of McNamara's admission that he was "wrong, terribly wrong."
He displayed a measure of self-awareness, and self-doubt, that is healthy -- and all too rare among major figures in the military-industrial complex about which Dwight Eisenhower warned about on the eve of Robert McNamara's confirmation as Secretary of Defense, and of which McNamara was an embodiment.
Consider the prospect that Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld will ever admit to having been "wrong, terribly wrong" about Iraq and you begin to get a measure of the meaning of the former Defense Secretary's late-in-life admissions. It can easily be argued that he was insufficiently repentant, and insufficiently insightful. But there was something refreshing about the fact that McNamara felt compelled to try and explain himself.
   * Copyright Ã"šÃ‚ © 2009 The Nation
Do admissions of errors ease the burden of those errors?
McNamara lived long enough to raise these questions.
History will answer them, perhaps unkindly.
He displayed a measure of self-awareness, and self-doubt, that is healthy -- and all too rare among major figures in the military-industrial complex about which Dwight Eisenhower warned about on the eve of Robert McNamara's confirmation as Secretary of Defense, and of which McNamara was an embodiment.
Consider the prospect that Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld will ever admit to having been "wrong, terribly wrong" about Iraq and you begin to get a measure of the meaning of the former Defense Secretary's late-in-life admissions. It can easily be argued that he was insufficiently repentant, and insufficiently insightful. But there was something refreshing about the fact that McNamara felt compelled to try and explain himself.
   * Copyright Ã"šÃ‚ © 2009 The Nation
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