America's Eichmann?

Amid the hubub of celebrity deaths, one may have been overlooked. While certainly not a celebrity in the conventional sense, Robert McNamara was known to the public during the 1960's. He was Secretary of Defense during both Kennedy's and Johnson's administration and architect of the military attack on Vietnam. McNamara was a brilliant statistician and employed his talents equally to both achieve a measure of standardization in the US military and perpetrate great war crimes. Serving in WWII, he analysed the effectiveness of bombing raids on Axis cities with coldly calculating efficiency in a clean office. This service arguably shortened the war but caused vast harm to innocent civilians in Japan, but when repeated over targets in Vietnam was as ineffective as it was criminal.

These actions were analogous to Hannah Arendt's famous thesis of the banality of evil, the inevitable by-product of a highly specialized division of labor in modern states. The pilots and aircrews dropping bombs on "enemy" targets took comfort in knowing that they were just following orders while the planners were safely ensconsed far from the destruction, not seeing the results of their decisions. McNamara could have easily declined to participate in the devestation in Vietnam, instead remaining at Ford Motor Company and employing his skills for production of useful products. Division of labor means that others were in charge of propaganda to lure talented individuals into service to harm mankind. We did lose in Vietnam despite dropping more bombs on that little country than in all of WWII, as a result, nothing happened.

McNamara had a counterpart in Nazi Germany, a similarly skilled statistical manager named Adolf Eichmann who made the trains to Auschwitz run on time. It is a useful comparison and very telling in how war criminals are treated in America. Eichmann was captured, tried and executed despite never actually pulling the trigger. McNamara lived a long life and died comfortably in his bed. I don't want to play hindsight gotcha, McNamara was doing what he felt was his duty for his country but had WWIII occured and the US lost, he almost certainly would have been executed. At very least he was a very intelligent, dedicated public servant who actually felt some connection to something beyond profit.

How about the current crop of war criminals that were (are) responsible for vast death and destruction in Iraq? There is nothing banal, dedicated or even competent about either dick cheney or donald rumsfeld (the memory hole has claimed the former's role in the 1991 war). McNamara did what he perceived as necessary to protect his country from the existential threat of world communism, the contemporaries may claim that islamic fundamentalism is equally threatening but there is no way they can actually believe it. In fact, the irresponsible and callous actions of the bush administration may in time lead to America's collapse.

That is a story for another day however, the passing of Robert McNamara harkens back to a day when the US actually took aggression seriously, instead of simply manufacturing a threat to destroy for fun and profit. I imagine McNamara would view the outsourcing of military functions, rebuilding efforts and all of the completely insane moves of the bush criminals for what they are. It really goes without saying how far we have fallen.