McNamara, Halberstam and Afghanistan
Tne New Republic has a fascinating piece about the passing of Robert McNamara and the lessons of David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest.
McNamara's passing was the subject of much discussion couple weeks ago, with Christian Century weighing in and Randall Balmer with a post religiondispatches.org among many others.
The article in New Republic covers the bases from Dean Rusk to Tom Hayden.
Here is the conclusion:
Even if you set aside all the other reasons the United States got into Vietnam--the gutting of expertise, the bullishness of the military, the miscalculation of the internal politics of the country, the anti-communist fervor, the roles of Rusk and Taylor--and focus solely on McNamara, the analogy with Obama is pretty difficult to sustain. "McNamara's ghost is hovering" over Afghanistan, Tom Hayden wrote in an obituary of the secretary. But wars aren't made by ghosts, and they don't proceed according to allegory. Kennedy chose as his defense secretary the president of a car company. Obama chose the sitting secretary of defense. Obama's brainiacs--people like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner and Peter Orszag--come from a different meritocracy than Kennedy's did. They are not brilliant generalists. For better or for worse, they are experts.
And the link to the full article:
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=8536793b-188a-483c-b745-c746e2236c19
McNamara's passing was the subject of much discussion couple weeks ago, with Christian Century weighing in and Randall Balmer with a post religiondispatches.org among many others.
The article in New Republic covers the bases from Dean Rusk to Tom Hayden.
Here is the conclusion:
Even if you set aside all the other reasons the United States got into Vietnam--the gutting of expertise, the bullishness of the military, the miscalculation of the internal politics of the country, the anti-communist fervor, the roles of Rusk and Taylor--and focus solely on McNamara, the analogy with Obama is pretty difficult to sustain. "McNamara's ghost is hovering" over Afghanistan, Tom Hayden wrote in an obituary of the secretary. But wars aren't made by ghosts, and they don't proceed according to allegory. Kennedy chose as his defense secretary the president of a car company. Obama chose the sitting secretary of defense. Obama's brainiacs--people like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner and Peter Orszag--come from a different meritocracy than Kennedy's did. They are not brilliant generalists. For better or for worse, they are experts.
And the link to the full article:
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=8536793b-188a-483c-b745-c746e2236c19
posted by foxofbama | 12:33 PM
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