March of Folly

15 October 2004


Sy Hersh’s Chain of Command is a 21st Century The Best and The Brightest

The year 2004 will be remembered as the year of the polemic book. From the left and the right, there has been a large number of political diatribes published in book form. The trend reflects the election campaign, and the high stakes that go with it. Among the National Book Award nominees for best non-fiction is the 9/11 Commission Report. Yet, the one that is likely to endure beyond this decade is Chain of Command by Seymour Hersh.

Those who have read David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest may get an uneasy sense of déjà vu from Mr. Hersh’s work. American power coupled with arrogance and leavened with deception are the themes of both works. In many respects, Iraq is not Vietnam. In many respects, though, the policy-makers have done the exact same things and expected different results. That is one definition of insanity.

The most troubling parallel is that between Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, and one of his successors, Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 and again form 1993 to the present. Both men “knew” better than their generals and the life-long civilian leadership at the Pentagon. Mr. McNamara, whose qualification for running a counter-insurgency in South East Asia appears to have been 15 years at Ford Motor Company. Steeped in the culture of Detroit, multi-national manufacturing and quantification of immeasurables, Mr. McNamara’s strategy might have worked against General Motors, but not the Viet Cong.

Mr. Rumsfeld has less of an excuse. Mr. McNamara quite simply was unqualified for the job. Mr. Rumsfeld as noted was already Defense Secretary once before. He was also a congressman, US ambassador to NATO, White House Chief of Staff. Here, it might have been a case of a man with some learning thinking he knew it all. Throughout the build up to the war, he kept telling his generals to cut the number of forces to be used. General Shinseki lost his job for saying that several hundred thousands troops would be needed in Iraq. In hindsight, the wrong man was forced from office.

Mr. Hersh won a Pulitzer for his reporting on the My Lai massacre. He has put himself in line for another in this analysis of just where and when American foreign policy fell apart. His detractors over Vietnam claim he undermined the morale of the troops and gives aid and comfort to the enemy, and the same charges will crop up over the current work. The charge, though, isn’t true. As very conservative Senator Lindsay Graham said of the Abu Ghraib scandal, “If you’re gonna be the good guys, you have to act like the good guys.” Holding the government accountable is what patriotism in a republic means, which is what this book tries to do.

© Copyright 2004 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.

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