Robert McNamara and the New American Gestapo

Americans have a habit of misunderstanding our enemies. What happens when the enemy is us?

In 1965, after nearly a decade of increasing U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Robert McNamara launched Operation Rolling Thunder, a years-long massive escalation of American military force intended to boost morale in South Vietnam, disrupt supply lines, signal American resolve, and, ultimately, force the North to give up support for the communist insurgency.

Eventually, we would fly more than 300,000 attack sorties and drop almost 900,000 tons of bombs on the North Vietnamese. The scope and breadth of the operation continued to expand and evolve at an astronomical cost in dollars, equipment, and American casualties.

And, in the end, it was a failure. But even as Operation Rolling Thunder was getting underway, as early as 1965, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, first under Kennedy and then Johnson, was having doubts that the United States could win this war.

We all know he was right. Later, even prior to his 1967 resignation, he began to express his skepticism in public and to President Johnson,

saying in a memo that sending more troops would not make this war winnable.

Nonetheless, the war continued, and McNamara’s understanding of the war continued to evolve. What he eventually came to realize has powerful implications for all of us in this current state of perpetual crisis that President Trump has set upon us.

When Trump started his brief, counterintuitive attack on Iran, I was at an anniversary party for a nonprofit in town. A friend found me and whispered in my ear, Trump’s attacking Iran.

People had gotten dressed up for the party. We all had that happy-heavy look on our faces, like we were trying to forget something for a minute, and it was sorta working. There was cheese. There was bread. Some wine. It was a little break from the world. But here the world had broken back in. The friend who told me about the attack was concerned because she knew that my wife has family in Tehran. I decided not to tell my wife until after the party because, for the love of God, enough is enough. She needed now, this moment, for escape.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I would sneak into the corner to look at my phone for updates. I work in political media, after all, and this was not only something that personally affected my family, it was a story. Potentially, it was a HUGE story that I might be spending the rest of the summer covering.

More than that, though, I had people whose safety was currently unknown. I imagined them sitting in the dark in their apartment, scared. Earlier in the week, when Bibi Netanyahu launched his war, our people in Tehran could hear the explosions but couldn’t tell where they were hitting. I wondered, do you see the flash and count one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi to know how close you came to being reduced to ashes? Or, as Trump likes to say, obliterated?

This is a human thing to wonder. You may have wondered something like this without knowing anyone in Israel or Iran. Who are we bombing, and are they going to be okay?

“We misjudged then — and we have since — the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries… and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.”

~Robert McNamara

When my wife and I got home from the party, I let her know that Iran was under attack. We had expected something like this would happen, but it was still a gut punch. My wife said, Well … I guess now the Iranians have a reason to build nukes.

That is the moment McNamara popped into my brain.

In both his 1995 memoir and the 2003 Errol Morris documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, he made the point that, and I’m paraphrasing, we underestimated the North Vietnamese because we didn’t know them. We failed to understand something so wildly simple and essential about human nature: Humans do not like to be killed. If we are cornered, we will fight until we are dead.

Remember, one of the objectives of Operation Rolling Thunder was to convince the North Vietnamese to lay down their weapons and end the war. The fatal flaw in our thinking was not only that the South would rejoice in the overwhelming destruction of their countrymen in the North, but that the North would somehow come to their senses if we killed them a lot.

Do you feel peace when you get punched in the face? You do not. When you punish your child, does she admit to being so terrible and deserving of punishment that she gratefully acknowledges the righteousness of your punishment?

McNamara came to the conclusion that he and the administrations he worked within got the Vietnamese all wrong. Our conquest was not their conquest. We were not their saviors. And the North didn’t view us as a threat to their system of governance; they viewed us as the people who killed their families and set their homes on fire. We were a cancer. You either kill the cancer or it kills you. I would not feel differently.

I don’t think you would, either.

Iran has been attacked for, essentially, no reason (as per our own intelligence). Bibi has wanted to attack them for decades. And yes, the leadership in Iran must go. But not for Bibi’s sake. The leadership in Iran must go for the sake of my family, cowering in a dark apartment in the Tehran night, who fled the kind of state-sponsored violence in 1979 that we are now facing in the United States.

Big bursts of light and heat ignited the skies over Iran and likely accomplished the exact opposite of their intended goals because Trump and his advisors not only do not know their enemy, they view empathy as a fundamental flaw. They are not curious people. The leadership in Iran now understands that we can bomb them whenever we want, and there’s no rhyme or reason. If I were them, I’d build a nuke.

So like the administrations of the 1950s and ‘60s, the current administration has a fundamental misunderstanding of not only its enemy, but of what it means to be human. But this administration doesn’t have the capacity or desire to evolve, like even the data-driven war-monger McNamara was able to manage.

And here’s where this gets incredibly dark: while the “war” in Iran is over (for now), the House is currently considering a budget that would turn ICE into one of the world’s most elite, deadliest, and well-resourced militaries on the planet.

And who is their enemy?

“Our misjudgments of friend and foe, alike, reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.”

~Robert McNamara

Our neighbor down the street told us where he keeps the key to his back door hidden in case we need to hide.

McNamara eventually realized that the Vietnamese were human beings like him, who wanted to live their lives without getting the shit bombed out of them. To be fair, that’s a surprising amount of introspection for an American. All it took was billions of dollars spent on weapons and hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded Americans for him to realize it.

Trump does not wonder how Americans feel about a $175 billion Gestapo being deployed against them. He doesn’t feel any human connection to the kitchens we all grew up in, the smell of our favorite meal. He isn’t curious about any of us or the richness of our cultural or familial heritage.

He doesn’t care who taught you to ride a bike, or about the people you love and who love you back. He doesn’t want to hear the music you make. He will never care about that white-hot center that drives you through this universe. He only seeks to extinguish it.

It’s hard for any of us to understand the motivation behind the ICE raids. Why are they doing this to us? The Vietnamese, the Afghans, the Iraqis, the Iranians — perhaps as they rushed their children into the safest little corner of their homes as the world around them exploded, they felt a similar confusion. Why are they doing this to us?

But it’s the confusion of the administration — not our confusion — that is essential here. To imagine that invading American cities, screeching up to a Home Depot in an unmarked van and full tactical gear, tackling dads trying to earn a living for their families, pushing women around, forcing children to represent themselves in court — to think of this as American salvation is to fundamentally misunderstand Americans.

As Robert McNamara found, when you misunderstand your enemy, your efforts to break them will fail spectacularly, and at an enormous cost.

And when you understand them, you realize they do not need to be broken in the first place. Like bombing Iran, like Operation Rolling Thunder — Trump is fighting an unwinnable and completely unnecessary war. But this time, it’s against us.

We can neutralize Iran’s nuclear program without bombing them. Bombing them could likely accelerate their efforts.

And we can fix immigration without losing our humanity.

Trump will lose.

---