Fog of war can't hide catastrophe (Iraq)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/10434

By PHILIP GAILEY
I wonder if there is a Robert McNamara in the Bush War Cabinet? And if there is, how long will we have to wait for him to come clean about the war in Iraq? McNamara, a key architect of the Vietnam disaster, waited 25 years to unburden himself of a terrible secret _ he knew at the time Vietnam was a lost cause but said nothing.

About the only thing we can be sure of is that if a truth teller eventually emerges from the Bush administration, it won't be Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld. Will it be Colin Powell, the former secretary of state who feels he was used by the White House to sell bogus intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction to the public? Since leaving office Powell has given hints of opposition, but the loyal soldier in him makes it unlikely he would bare the mistakes of George W. Bush's war council. He prefers to be an anonymous source for The Washington Post's Bob Woodward.

McNamara, secretary of defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, finally told us his shameful secret in his 1995 memoirs, "In Retrospect." He says the war was wrong, and he knew it at the time he and President Johnson were sending thousands of young Americans to Vietnam to fight and die. Despite his contrary assurances to Congress and the American people, McNamara says it became clear to him that the war could not be won but he could not bring himself to speak out or share his doubts with the president.

"I believe that would have been a violation of my responsibility to the president and my oath to uphold the Constitution," he wrote.

Even more unforgivable, McNamara kept his silence as President Nixon prolonged the war for almost five years. By the end of the Johnson presidency, the American people had turned against the war. They had already figured out the truth McNamara was hiding _ that the war was unwinnable and not worth another drop of American blood.