The left's view of McNamara

Adam Brodsky:

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McNamara was an "icy-veined, cold-visaged . . . point man for a war that sent thousands upon thousands of people (most of them young) to their utterly pointless deaths," one left-wing critic wrote in The New York Times this week.

Such imagery has carried over to the Iraq war -- and even to a possible engagement with Iran over its quest for nukes.

There are surely legitimate views on both sides when conflict must be contemplated. Doves may see smaller risks from a given threat than hawks, a more bearable downside, greater costs of confrontation. They may assign lower odds of success, or claim to have more promising or less costly ways to address the threat. Oftentimes, who knows who's right?

But the left's loaded, ridiculously simplistic rhetoric unfairly discounts the legitimate views of those who opt to face threats squarely. And in focusing on the price of engagement, the anti-war crowd also obscures the conceivably higher cost of not acting.

Vietnam was a hot battle in the Cold War. It grew from America's legitimate fears of a dangerous, illegitimate movement: communism -- which was spread by force and illicit co-option and which put liberties, and lives, at stake. Communist regimes in the Soviet Union, and China, had already killed tens of millions -- and subjugated hundreds of millions.

And the threat was rising: Khrushchev had placed nukes 90 miles from Florida (though he later stood down).

The Cold War, that is, involved a fight against an ideology every bit as pernicious as Nazism. Or Islamism. As for Vietnam, even if you suppose the critics right -- that it was unwinnable (it wasn't) -- challenging the creep of this enemy was nonetheless worth something.

As even the Times wrote in a 1965 editorial, the US "went into Vietnam to contain the advance of Communism . . . The motives are exemplary and every American can be proud of them."

Similar logic applies to Iraq. After America was attacked on 9/11, it was important for us to demonstrate our willingness to combat threats -- and Saddam Hussein was viewed as such, whatever his true intentions or capabilities.

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The decision to fight in Vietnam was not the problem. It was the way we fought that was the problem. From the early days when a naval confrontation was used as a casus belli, instead of a clear breach of the Geneva Accords by the communist using the Ho Chi Minh Trail was the more obvious cause. If we had used that breach then the logical consequences would have called for us to send troops into Laos to block the trail which would have ended the war rather quickly.

But McNamara and others feared that would lead to Chinese intervention so they chose to ignore the obvious and fight around the edges. This lead to a longer more costly war. McNamara and others in the Democrat administration also tried to modulate the tempo of the war with restrictions on bombing targets which led to more planes being shot down.

After the war was over the communist admitted that blocking the trial would have defeated them and the Chinese never had any intentions of coming to the North Vietnamese aid with troops. That was a significant miscalculation.