Robert Strange McNamara, RIP

"The question I wanted to ask him was this: 'Mr. McNamara, how is it after nearly destroying the Ford Motor Corporation, then destroying Viet Nam and almost destroying the [US], and then going on to be the president of the World Bank, where you made great strides towards destroying the world economy, how it is possible that today you can be held in high regard and stand up in front of this audience without being pelted with rotten fruit and vegetables?' ... The fact that McNamara and these other number crunchers were hired by Ford is, to me, indicative of the start of the collapse of the American auto industry. ... It was him who was more responsible than anyone else for the fetish they developed for building steel mills in parts of Africa that were on the opposite sides of the continent from coal supplies, etc. It was another disaster. His career is a series of unmitigated disasters, and still, he's held in some kind of regard today. ... The US is making the same mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan as it did in Viet Nam. ... The more the US attacks them the more they feel threatened and feel they have to counterattack. And when they do, the fearmongers in this country feel threatened, and it keep escalating. ... At some point, somebody is going to get hold of one or more nuclear devices, or maybe a biological weapon, from one source or another. There are many possible way that could happen. Then they fly it into the US on a commerical airliner and detonate it on landing, or load it in a perfectly harmless-looking commercial boat and set it off as soon as the boat docks", Doug Casey (DC) at Lew Rockwell, 10 July 2009, link: http://www.lewrockwell.com/casey/casey14.1.html.

"Intelligent idiots, smart fools, multi-degreed morons--lots of monikers could describe a category of individuals dismayingly prominent in the ruling elites of the West. They are the people so divorced from reality, so engrosed in bookish pursuits that--for all their undoubted intellectual accomplishments and often as a direct consequence thereof--they invariably end up with egg on their faces whenever they try to engage in practical activities. ... It is a common mistake of intellectuals to confuse IQ with common sense and verbal fluency with leadership qualities. ... All [of Obama's] brilliant academics have been brought on board for the sole purpose of lending an intellectual veneer to Obama's political schemes and validate his power grab. ... Which should remind us of the conduct of the Vietnam War by another undeniably brilliant man, full of theories and impressively in command of the data, Robet McNamara, 'the perfect man' in Lyndon Johnson admiring characterization, who died earlier this week at 93. John F. Kennedy brought a tean of 'the best and the brightest' from Harvard to manage the war. They invaded the Pentagon and set about doing what they did best (and actually the only thing they knew): writing learned position papers, drawing charts and measuring results. ... Finally the day came when the fateful point was reached and ... nothing happened. The enemy blithely continued fighting ", Vitor Volsky at The American Thinker, 11 July 2009, link: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/07/the_audacity_of_conceit.html.

I disagree with DC about one thing in his piece, our war with Islamofascism. It is one more battle in the jihad against Christendom that began in 710 AD when Moslems went from Africa to Spain. DC may not like this, but it is literally kill or be killed. The Crusades were a response to Moslems chasing Christians out of the Middle East. That's history. Unlike Viet Nam, the US has not "escalated" anything in the current "Global War on Terror (GWOT)". While we are making many of the same mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan we made in Viet Nam, we aren't fighting a GWOT. Terror, as many have noted is a tactic, not an enemy. We even arm Palestinians against Israel. Our "GWOT" is insane. DC is correct about how terrorists do not need ICBMs to set off a nuke in the US. Just float a ship into New York Harbor, dock and then kaboom. I said this years ago. For decades now, I've called Robert McNamara, the "Man Who Never Did Anything Right In His Life".

McNamara and his crowd could not conceive that people exist in the world who do not think, nor behave like us. Really.