Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara meets with Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese communist army commander during the war.

Note: Former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara has died at the age of 93. The Daily Mirror presents David Halberstam's review of his 1995 book, "In Retrospect" and opinion pieces from 2001 and 2003.

Dead Wrong

Robert McNamara says he miscalculated our chances in Vietnam, but what's not in his book is as telling as what is.

April 16, 1995

IN RETROSPECT: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, By Robert McNamara (Times Books/Random House: $25; 356 pp.)

By David Halberstam

David Halberstam won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the
Vietnam War for the New York Times. He is now at work on his 15th book,
about what became of the young people he covered during the Civil
Rights sit-ins in Nashville in 1960.

About 25 years ago,
when I was working on the book that became "The Best and the
Brightest," I spent part of a surreal afternoon with Robert McNamara,
then head of the World Bank. My book was designed to explain how and
why we went to war in Vietnam, or more specifically how men who were
once viewed (at the very least by themselves and their journalistic and
academic acolytes) as the ablest men to serve in government in this
century could be the architects of what was arguably the century's most
tragic miscalculation. Suffice it to say that McNamara himself was not
very much help in my quest. He said he would see me but would not talk
about any of his experiences on Vietnam, "out of loyalty to Presidents
Johnson and Kennedy."

That day he absolutely stonewalled me on
any questions on the origins of the Vietnam commitment. But to my
surprise, he grew warmer and friendlier as he began to talk about his
efforts to bring a halt to the bombing. Suddenly he became willing,
almost eager to talk about Vietnam–indeed, he was voluble about the
latter part of the war when he, aware that our military presence in
Vietnam could not succeed, had initiated a doomed attempt to start
fruitful negotiations with Hanoi. These would be preceded by a bombing
halt, which he was working for.

The bombing halt and the attempt
to bring negotiations turned out, of course, to be futile; Hanoi knew
very well, far better than he did, that it was dealing from a position
of strength, that it had blunted our military commitment and that it
need now only wait for our inevitable departure–albeit at very high
cost to its own young men. Yet in my session with him McNamara was
willing to talk about precisely that part of his service when in fact
Lyndon Johnson did begin to think he was disloyal, but where history
and historians might feel more generously inclined toward him than the
earlier period of his service when he was one of the fiercest
proponents of escalation. For that reason he had suddenly become
cooperative.

I tell this story at some length here because
reading "In Retrospect" is very much like being with McNamara and
watching his puzzling, contorted performance on that strange difficult
afternoon 25 years ago.

This is a shallow, mechanistic,
immensely disappointing book. Had it been published 25 years ago while
the battle itself and the debate over it was still raging–had McNamara
come forth then and said, as he does here, that what had come to be
known as "McNamara's War" was "wrong, terribly wrong," it would have
been an extremely valuable part of the ongoing debate; indeed, it might
have ended the debate then and there. A secretary of defense of his
seeming certitude who came forward and said that he had been mistaken
in his earlier estimates and that the war could not be won would have
been the most powerful of witnesses and would be now a revered American
instead of one of our most divided and haunted of men. Sadly, the inner
strength to do that, to put loyalty to country and to a larger truth
above a narrow bureaucratic loyalty to a President and failed policy,
was not within his powers.

In this book, much heralded by his
publisher as a mea culpa, the agenda is McNamara's, not the reader's.
That is not surprising: He has always been a control freak, and one of
his singular skills, going back to his years at Ford, was his ability
to take command of a given bureaucratic agenda and to set the terms in
which an issue was debated according to his strengths rather than those
of potential opponents. In this book he not only gets to give the
answers he wants but he also gets to choose the questions he asks
himself. As he did with me that day, he still controls the ground rules.

In
these surprisingly bloodless, carefully sanitized pages, McNamara is
like a player at the poker table who, when the game is over still
refuses to show his cards. The book is almost devoid of mood, insight
and spiritual texture. He does not reveal his own feelings at that
terrible moment in 1967 when he realized that his military calculations
were wrong, that thousands and thousands of Americans and Vietnamese
were dying each week and that, of all the things that he had done in a
seemingly admirable career, he would be remembered more than anything
else for Vietnam. This is not his way; there are no feelings here. We
will never even know if he has ever visited the Vietnam Memorial.

Nor
is this an intellectual's book, for McNamara, despite the attempts of
so many people in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to sell him
as an intellectual, was never very much of an intellectual; his mind
was at best technocratic. Nor is it a historian's book, lacking the
richness of texture that Henry Kissinger at his best supplied to his
own memoir, for Kissinger, with his immigrant vulnerability to other
men of power, was fascinated by all those around him and sensed the
nuance of every person he dealt with.

By comparison, McNamara
never seems to have had any interest in anyone else, save perhaps his
immediate superiors. His insights into the other key players as they
face the denouement of 20 years of deeply flawed policies are almost
nonexistent, worthy of an eighth grader: Gen. Paul Harkins, the
American general in Saigon in 1962 and 1963, a man best remembered for
deceiving Washington on the war's progress (as Washington wanted to be
deceived) appears as "tall, handsome and articulate; he looked and
spoke exactly as a general should." (In fact on another occasion,
McNamara said of Harkins, "He wasn't worth a damn, so we got rid of
him.") Or of Lyndon Johnson, about the best we get is this: "one of the
most complex, intelligent and hard working individuals I have ever
known. He possessed a kaleidoscopic personality . . . a towering
paradoxical figure."

One can almost imagine the disappointment
of his editors when the manuscript finally came in: Is this all we get?
they must have asked. Can't we get him to tell more about how it felt
in those meetings when they were deciding to cross the Rubicon?

This
most bureaucratic of histories nevertheless reveals a struggle between
two McNamaras: the McNamara who was the fierce advocate of
intervention, and the McNamara who came two years later to understand
that the war was a tragic miscalculation, that neither side could win.

The
Bad McNamara worked the Pentagon and the Good McNamara worked
Georgetown and the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, where
miraculously enough, for a time he was president. The Good McNamara
tried to stop the bombing and whispered privately to his select
journalistic friends that he was a dove while the Bad McNamara tried to
signal to the military that he was still on board, that he still
believed their estimates and thought the war winnable. The Bad McNamara
was willing to go on network television endlessly in the war's early
days to help project a sense of confidence about the progress of the
war. The Good McNamara, as he is quick to tell us in these pages, went
to the President in 1965 and asked for a tax increase to cover the
otherwise inevitable budget deficit of the expanding war; when the
President refused him and told him he was politically naive, the Bad
McNamara thereupon loyally lied to the Council of Economic Advisers on
the President's behalf, advising them to forecast a small war in a
moment of dissembling he fails to mention in this book.

For a
long time the only thing the two McNamaras had in common was an
agreement that they would not talk publicly about Vietnam. Then the Bad
McNamara finally gave the Good McNamara permission to write the book,
but the Good McNamara is still so locked up and emotionally blocked–so
incapacitated by the deeds of the Bad McNamara–that he found no
freedom when he set down to write.

McNamara was always a superb
bureaucrat, a fierce apparatchik, who sensing what his superiors
wanted, took no prisoners in his struggle with peers and subordinates
alike. His rise in the post-World War II years, first at Ford, and then
at the Pentagon, symbolized the coming of the super-accountant as the
driving force of the ever larger, virtually uncontrollable
super-corporation, the man who in the computer-driven age could use
numbers not merely as small bits of information to keep a company out
of the red but, far more important, as a weapon of power, overwhelming
opponents and critics with facts or pseudo-facts.

To McNamara,
numbers still have an almost poetic quality, and one of the few moments
in this book when he comes alive and seems almost lyrical is when he
talks about them: "My mathematics professors taught me to see math as a
process of thought–a language in which to express much, but certainly
not all, human activity. It was a revelation. To this day I see
quantification as a language to add precision to reasoning about the
world. Of course it cannot deal with issues of morality, beauty and
love, but it is a powerful tool too often neglected when we seek to
overcome poverty, fiscal deficits or the failure of our national health
programs. . . ."

Sadly for him, for the nation and for the
Vietnamese, Vietnam of all wars most resolutely withstood quantitative
analysis. The numbers never revealed the burden of the immediate past;
they failed to show, for instance, that the other side's commanders
were the architects of a great revolution that had already defeated
first the French and then the Army of South Vietnam, aided and advised
by Americans. The science of quantitative analysis, which McNamara had
cherished because it seemed to have such purity, was like a god that
failed him. Bring systems analysis to a badly aberrated policy and it
is no help; humans will simply jiggle the numbers as necessary. The
computer becomes useless. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.

McNamara,
nevertheless, was not merely a great square of the Midwest, an
apolitical man with a taste for numbers. He was in fact a great
political operator, a killer inside the bureaucracy with a superb sense
of how to put opponents on the defensive and to exploit their
weaknesses while concealing any of his own. He understood every nuance
of power and how to hold it.

While at Ford, he was so tense and
driven that he ground his teeth at night. In time this caused serious
dental problems. For treatment he selected a dentist in New York, lest
news of his neurosis get out in the gossipy, incestuous world of
Detroit; lest it subtract from the myth of his omniscience, from his
image of a man completely in control, cool and calm. Grinding his teeth
might have cost him more than dental pain; it might have cost him
power. He and those in the financial cadre he helped create and who
followed him at Ford knew little about cars and were often almost
scornful of those who did, but they knew how to bring organization to a
sprawling, poorly run company, and they learned how to destroy
opponents who were skilled in engineering or manufacturing but innocent
of politics.

What worked for McNamara in Detroit worked for him
even better in Washington for a time. He had more and better numbers
than anyone else around the Pentagon, and given the growing complexity
of weapons systems and their cost, he was a valuable ally for the
Kennedys in the early going.

One must sympathize with his early
role as the Administration's point man for Vietnam. He moved quickly
into a vacuum on a deeply flawed, essentially dishonest policy, though
he did it with no small amount of hubris and arrogance. Dean Rusk was a
weak secretary of state who accepted (all too readily) all the norms
and givens of the era. As for our real Asia experts, the Asian
equivalents of Kennan, Bohlen and Thompson, they had all been driven
out of the Foreign Service by the McCarthy era, their sin being that
they accurately predicted the collapse of China's nationalist leader
Chiang Kai-shek.

True McCarthyism, it should be pointed out, was
not just the demented ravings and accusations of the alcoholic junior
senator from Wisconsin against a few flawed political leftists; the
truest manifestation and the lasting legacy of McCarthyism was the
willingness of one political party to use the issue of subversion
against the other party (even against an Administration as hard-line in
stopping European communism as the Truman-Acheson one had been).

What
was worst about those accusations was how deeply they seeped into the
political bloodstream. The Democrats were accused of losing China to
the Communists (though of course there had been no Republican
congressional voices in favor of sending American troops to fight for
Chiang on mainland China). In time the Democrats were driven from
office, but the McCarthy charge seemed to stick in their collective
political psyche; in the future they did not dare lose a country to
communism.

Let us then set the Kennedy years in truer context: A
team of brilliant rationalists had taken office but for political
reasons they were dealing with irrational assumptions on American
policy in Asia, which they were afraid of challenging because they did
not want to take the political heat required to change the existing
policies.

Thus we were unable to see China for what it was:
nationalist revolution rather than Soviet Communist expansionism. Nor
were we able to recognize, more than a decade after Mao had come to
power, that there were important new opportunities for American policy
in the emerging, historic split between China and Russia, based again
on nationalism.

The reason the Kennedys did not see them was not
lack of intelligence but an awareness of the political cost of even
thinking about dealing with China. Even to discuss the possibility in
the most private of meetings was to open the door to severe assault
from the right. (Thus the opening to China would be left for Richard
Nixon a decade later, secure in the knowledge that when he went to
China to start diplomatic relations, he would not be red baited by
Richard Nixon.)

McNamara, nevertheless, wasn't merely the loyal
domestic policy servant he portrays himself to be in these pages. Both
publicly and privately, he was a fierce advocate of escalation, and for
a time he became the driving force of the war, the man who loved the
truth of numbers, but who would be remembered sadly, for one set of
numbers above all others: the body count.

McNamara also denies
playing an active role in the rigging of the information that came out
of Saigon. On Page 43, I encountered this truly remarkable sentence:
"None of us–not me, not the President, not Mac (Bundy), nor Dean, nor
Max–was ever satisfied with the information we received from Vietnam."
For Robert S. McNamara to write so singularly dishonest a sentence 30
years after the escalation of the war, in a book heralded as a mea
culpa is, it seems to me, perilously close to a felony, and a sign that
he is a man so contorted and so deep in his own unique self-delusion
and self-division, that he still doesn't know who he is and what he did
at that time.

(One of the ironies of this book is that there is
a rare moment when McNamara's normally muted voice becomes both real
and passionate and it is his attempt to settle an old score with Barry
Goldwater. The Arizona senator had blamed McNamara for the Edsel, which
was not a McNamara car, and the secretary of defense remains outraged
by this and by Goldwater's subsequent refusal in 1964 to drop the
charge, even after other Ford men wrote saying it was not a McNamara
car. That McNamara, by rigging the information on Vietnam through 1963
and 1964 in order to serve a Democratic President in the most blatant
political way imaginable, sinned more against Goldwater than Goldwater
ever sinned against him does not seem to occur to him.)

By 1967,
McNamara knew that the American commitment was going to be blunted,
that we had underestimated the resilience of the other side and its
essential invulnerability to our technology. Privately anguished, he
was desperate for some way out. He seized on all kinds of ideas–one
was building an electronic fence around South Vietnam, an idea
privately ridiculed by almost all uniformed officers, and another was
some kind of bombing halt that might in time lead to negotiations. But
any bombing halt was doomed, because he refused to go public and say
what he knew: that the policy had essentially failed.

Here we
see McNamara for the first time as a completely divided man. The
government position was that we were winning, the secretary of efense
knew we were not, and his more hawkish colleagues had come to regard
him as figure of ridicule. He was effectively paralyzed. The emotional
erosion this division inflicted on McNamara was, his friends thought,
considerable. He was the hawk who had been the principal architect of
escalation and who now knew that it did not work, a man at war with
himself. Finally, Lyndon Johnson, fearing both for McNamara's sanity
and health, and loyalty (ever the political realist, Johnson feared
that Bobby Kennedy would run against him in 1968, which he did, and
that McNamara might leave the Administration and go with Bobby and go
public with his doubts), dumped him and dispatched him to the World
Bank.

In the ensuing nearly 30 years he has remained silent as a
public man: distant from the public debate, a not-so-innocent
bystander, and yet still the gifted bureaucrat, a man still immensely
skilled in his private politicking with select journalists (primarily
liberal columnists and bureau chiefs) in the Washington area in order
to protect his own personal reputation and to float his own doubts in
proper, private genteel channels and keeping his reputation for being
on the right side of issues intact.

He is a man who seems to
live in a time warp. Vietnam happened but it didn't happen. No rain has
ever fallen and dampened those great reputations of 34 years ago. To
him, the Kennedy team is still as dazzling as ever, its players are all
still the best and the brightest. Mac Bundy, essentially silent all
these years over the tragedy of Vietnam, is in his words "by far the
ablest National Security adviser I've observed over the last 40 years."
Max Taylor, a man whose uniformed subordinates thought that more than
anything else he was committed to keeping American ground troops off
the mainland of Asia, and whose fingerprints are all over the fateful
decisions to intervene, and whose own memoir seems to blame the failure
primarily on the press, remains "the wisest uniformed geopolitican and
security adviser I ever met." But McNamara is not really talking about
Mac Bundy and Max Taylor and his own hope that their reputations have
remained untarnished by Vietnam; he is really talking about himself. By
implication and extension, McNamara still thinks of himself as the
ablest secretary of defense of modern times, the man who tamed the
Pentagon.

I do not believe in war crimes on Vietnam, for there
was enough responsibility to go around for everyone involved. But
McNamara, given his role in the early days and his belief so early on
that the military involvement was a failure, is guilty of something
else: the crime of silence.

He tells us that while writing this
book, he asked himself, Why speak now? Why break my silence? Though
there are many reasons, he says, "the main one is that I have grown
sick at heart witnessing the cynicism and even contempt with which so
many people view our political institutions and leaders." Indeed? What
a charlatan. Has there ever been a more insulting sentence written by a
high public official? Does he know so little about why the mood of this
country has shifted? This from the man who remained silent when a
decision to tell the truth publicly might have not only diminished
cynicism but strengthened the democratic fabric.

This should
have been an important book. But it is not. It permits us some insight
into McNamara's inability to come to terms with his role and its
consequences, and it involuntarily offers a rare insight into the
difference between the mind of a truly public man and the mind of a
bureaucrat. But that is little recompense. McNamara comes to us now as
a sad and greatly diminished figure from a tainted past. The debate has
long since passed him by.

When we last saw him some 28 years
ago, ever so confidently lecturing to us about Vietnam, he was
deceiving millions and millions of his fellow Americans. Now with this
book, he is merely deceiving himself.

FANATICISM

The Nature of the Danger We Face



Sunday October 28, 2001

By ROBERT S. McNAMARA and JAMES G. BLIGHT

Robert
S. McNamara, former Secretary of Defense, and James G. Blight are
co-authors of "Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing
and Catastrophe in the 21st Century."

NEW YORK — For the
first time in a long time, Americans are fearful of attacks on the U.S.
itself, a fact dramatized by President Bush's decision to establish a
new Cabinet-level secretary for homeland defense. The attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the emerging threat of
bioterrorism and the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan, with its
risk of provoking new terrorist strikes against America, have produced
in a new generation of Americans an overwhelming feeling that the U.S.
is vulnerable in much the same way that the rest of the world is.

The
events of Sept. 11 have been likened to the British burning of
Washington in 1814, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's march from Atlanta
to the sea in the Civil War and Pearl Harbor. But there is a more
recent event during which Americans felt supremely vulnerable,
completely surprised and shocked, and fearful about where the
escalation would end: the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in
October 1962.

Not only is there a psychological similarity
between October 1962 and September 2001. There is also an unsettling
likeness in the extremely dangerous situations posed by Fidel Castro
and the Cuban people in 1962 and Osama bin Laden and the Taliban now.
Grasping their correlation may enable us to better respond to the
terrorist threat with less risk of catastrophic escalation.

Just
how close we came to nuclear war on the climatic weekend of the Cuban
Missile Crisis, Oct. 26-28, was not generally known until years later.
A remarkable series of meetings, beginning in March 1987 and ending in
January 1992, involving the former chief adversaries–Americans,
Russians and Cubans–of the crisis produced these principal revelations:

First,
any U.S. attack on Cuba would have also been an attack on more than
40,000 Soviet citizens–not the 10,000 the CIA had estimated–who were
deployed chiefly around the missile sites, which would have been
primary targets. A devastating Soviet response was thus likely, perhaps
a nuclear one.

Second, by that weekend, Castro had concluded
that an American air strike and invasion of his island was virtually
inevitable. In a cable to Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Cuban leader urged
the Soviet premier to launch an all-out nuclear strike against the U.S.
if the invasion occurred. "That would be the moment," Castro wrote, "to
eliminate such danger forever through an act of clear, legitimate
self-defense, however harsh and terrible the solution would be, for
there would be no other." Or as the translator of the cable, Soviet
Ambassador Aleksander Alekseev, put it in his own cable to Khrushchev,
Castro said: "If they attack Cuba, we should wipe them off the face of
the earth." Separately, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Castro's colleague,
declared his willingness "to walk by the path of liberation even when
it may cost millions of atomic victims."

Third, by Oct. 27, when
the majority of President John F. Kennedy's military and civilian
advisors favored an attack on Cuba, the Soviets had already delivered
162 nuclear warheads to the island and had stored them at a depot at
Bejucal, southwest of Havana. The CIA had believed that there were zero
warheads on Cuba. Since the U.S. invasion seemed imminent that weekend,
the Soviet field commander in Cuba, Gen. Issa Pliyev, ordered the
warheads for tactical weapons out of storage and moved closer to their
launchers.

All the pieces were thus in place for Armageddon. A
quarter of a million Cuban troops and more than 40,000 Soviet troops,
armed with dozens of tactical nuclear weapons, would have met a U.S.
invasion force, initiating nuclear war, in the (mistaken) assumption
that the U.S. forces would have attacked with nuclear weapons. The
Soviet troops, the Cuban leaders and the Cuban people would have paid
the ultimate price for this misperception. Yet, so would the Soviet
people, the American people–indeed, the entire world. For the
initiation of nuclear war would certainly have provoked a U.S. nuclear
response.

Fortunately, Khrushchev ordered the missile-carrying
Soviet ships bound for Cuba to alter course, thus signaling the end of
the crisis.

Are there insights to be applied to our current crisis?

Rather
than being 13 days of gamesmanship followed by an American victory, as
is popularly imagined, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the culmination of
a long history of bitter enmity between the U.S. and Cuba. In Cuba, the
crisis stirred notions of sacred mission, manhood, duty to a higher
cause and other cultural characteristics poorly understood in North
American (and Northern European) cultures. It aroused intense feelings
of both desperation and resignation. When viewed in this light, the
willingness of Cuban leaders to take measures that entailed huge risks
appear quite predictable.

Are Cubans the only people of limited
means who feel a need to confront the U.S. directly, "inviting" a U.S.
attack? Is Castro's communism the only belief system capable of driving
people to contemplate suicide, even national suicide, in the service of
their cause? Do we now understand non-Northern European systems of
ideas any better than we understood the potent blend of nationalism and
communism that moved Cubans to take on the most powerful and
influential nation on Earth? Are there currently charismatic leaders
like Castro capable of motivating their followers to carry out what may
seem to Americans to be unbelievable acts of violence against the U.S.?
If there are, can we depend on military means alone to change their
fanaticism? At what point, and after how much escalation, will it all
end?

We Need Rules for War

 History shows why U.S. should back the international court

August 03, 2003

By Robert S. McNamara,

On
the night of March 9, 1945, when the lead crews of the 21st Bomber
Command returned from the first firebombing mission over Tokyo, Gen.
Curtis LeMay was waiting for them in his headquarters on Guam. I was in
Guam on temporary duty from Air Force headquarters in Washington, and
LeMay had asked me to join him for the after-mission reports that
evening.

LeMay was just as tough as his reputation. In many
ways, he appeared to be brutal, but he was also the ablest commander of
any I met during my three years of service with the U.S. Army Air Corps
in World War II.

That night, he'd sent out 334 B-29 bombers,
seeking to inflict, as he put it, the maximum target destruction for
the minimum loss of American lives. World War II was entering its final
months, and the United States was beginning the last, devastating push
for an unconditional Japanese surrender.

On that one night
alone, LeMay's bombers burned to death 83,793 Japanese civilians and
injured 40,918 more. The planes dropped firebombs and flew lower than
they had in the past and therefore were both more accurate and more
destructive.

They leveled a large part of Tokyo, which I had
seen during a visit in 1937. It was a wooden city and burned like a
match when it was firebombed.

That night's raid was only the first of 67. Night after night — 66 more times — crews were sent out over the skies of Japan.

Of
course we didn't burn to death 83,000 people every night, but over a
period of months American bombs inflicted extraordinary damage on a
host of Japanese cities — 900,000 killed, 1.3 million injured, more
than half the population displaced.

The country was devastated.
The degree of killing was extraordinary. Radio Tokyo compared the raids
to the burning of Rome in the year 64.

LeMay was convinced that
it was the right thing to do, and he told his superiors (from whom he
had not asked for authority to conduct the March 9 raid), "If you want
me to burn the rest of Japan, I can do that."

LeMay's position on war was clear: If you're going to fight, you should fight to win.

In
the years afterward, he was quoted as saying, "If you're going to use
military force, then you ought to use overwhelming military force." He
also said: "All war is immoral, and if you let that bother you, you're
not a good soldier."

Today, looking back almost 60 years later
— and after serving as secretary of Defense for seven years during one
of the hottest periods of the Cold War, including the Cuban missile
crisis — I have to say that I disagree.

War may or may not be immoral, but it should be fought within a clearly defined set of rules.

One other thing LeMay said, and I heard him say it myself: "If we lose the war, we'll be tried as war criminals."

On
that last point, I think he was right. We would have been. But what
makes one's conduct immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

The
"just war" theory, first expounded by the great Catholic thinkers (I am
a Protestant), argues that the application of military power should be
proportional to the cause to which you're applying it. A prosecutor
would have argued that burning to death 83,000 civilians in a single
night and following up with 66 additional raids was not proportional to
our war aims.

War will not be eliminated in the foreseeable
future, if ever. But we can — and we must — eliminate some of the
violence and cruelty and excess that go along with it.

That's
why the U.S. so badly needs to participate in the International Court
for Crimes Against Humanity, which was recently established in The
Hague.

President Clinton signed that treaty on New Year's Eve
2000, just before leaving office, but in May 2002 President Bush
announced that the U.S. did not intend to become a party to the treaty.

The
Bush administration believes, and many agree with it, that the court
could become a vehicle for frivolous or unfair prosecutions of American
military personnel. Although that is a cause for concern, I believe we
should join the court immediately while we continue to negotiate
further protection against such cases.

If LeMay were alive, he
would tell me I was out of my mind. He'd say the proportionality rule
is ridiculous. He'd say that if you don't kill enough of the enemy, it
just means more of your own troops will die.

But I believe that
the human race desperately needs an agreed-upon system of jurisprudence
that tells us what conduct by political and military leaders is right
and what is wrong, both in conflict within nations and in conflict
across national borders.

We need a clear code, internationally
accepted, so that not only our Congress and president know, but so that
all our military and civilian personnel know as well what is legal in
conflict and what is illegal. And we need a court that can bring
wrongdoers to trial for their crimes.

Is it legal to incinerate
83,000 people in a single night to achieve your war aims? Was Hiroshima
legal? Was the use of Agent Orange — which occurred while I was
secretary of Defense — a violation of international law?

These questions are critical.

Our country needs to be involved, along with the International Court for Crimes Against Humanity, in the search for answers.

Robert S. McNamara was secretary of Defense under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.