Remembering Robert McNamara - May He Rest in Darkness

[zengrifter]

May He Rest in Darkness
McNamara: From the Tokyo Firestorm to the World Bank

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Robert McNamara, who died yesterday, July 6, served as Kennedy’s , then as Johnson’s defense secretary. He contributed more than most to the slaughter of 3.4 million Vietnamese (his own estimate). He went on to run the World Bank, where he presided over the impoverishment, eviction from their lands and death of many millions more round the world.



Just as George Kennan, one of the architects of the Cold War, helped bolt together the ramshackle scaffolding of bogus claims that provided the rationalization for Harry Truman’s great “arms scare” in 1948, launching the postwar arms race, McNamara tugged his forelock and said “Aye, aye, Sir” when Kennedy, campaigning against Nxon in the late 1950s attacked the Eisenhower/Nixon administration for having allowed a “missile gap” to develop that had now delivered America naked and helpless into the grip of the Soviet Union.

This was the biggest lie in the history of threat inflation and remains so to this day. At the moment when Kennedy, McNamara at his elbow, was flaying the Eisenhower administration for the infamous “gap”, the U.S. government from its spy planes that the Soviet Union had precisely one missile silo with an untested missile in it. The Russians knew that the US knew this, because they were fully primed about about the U-2 spy-plane overflights, most dramatically when U-2 pilot Gary Powers crashed near Sverdlovsk and told all to his captors

So when President Kennedy and Defense Secretary McNamara, took power in 1961, became privy to all intelligence from the spy flights, and announced that the U.S. was going to build 1000 ICBMs the Russians concluded that the US planned to wipe out the Soviet Union and immediately began a missile-building program of their own. So McNamara played a crucial, enabling role in the arms race in nuclear missiles. Before the “missile gap” it has been a “bomber race”.

It was entirely appropriate and logical that he began his services to the military working in Japan as a civilian analyst for Curt LeMay, the psychopathic Air Force general who ordered the raid that produced the Tokyo firestorm and who went on to become head of the Strategic Air Command and who boasted to Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis that his missiles and B-52s were ready, willing and able to reduce the Soviet Union to a “smoldering, irradiated ruin in three hours”, a deed he was eager to accomplish.

MORE- http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn07072009.html

[zengrifter]

July 12, 2009

McNamara deceived LBJ on Vietnam

Gareth Porter reveals R.McNamara, who died Monday, misled LBJ on Gulf of Tonkin attacks

VIDEO- http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?o...07-13+15:42:51

Paul Jay speaks to Garth Porter about former Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara who died Monday, July 6th. Porter says that documents he uncovered from the Lyndon B. Johnson library demonstrate that McNamara deceived LBJ over the Gulf of Tonkin incident. In spite of dubious reports that U.S. Navy ships were attacked by North Vietnamese fleet, "[McNamara] went ahead with drafting the strike order for the retaliation that night and actually [sent] that strike order without having basically consulted further with President Johnson about the situation that he now understood of real doubt on the part of the commander on the scene that they had been attacked."