Robert McNamara, Vietnam and Iraq

The death a few days ago of Robert S. McNamara may well have been the final chapter on the Vietnam War sans any expected future historical analysis.

All of the Presidents who conceived of, executed, slowed down and terminated the conflict are dead. The "best and the brightest" from the JFK and LBJ years are as well. Except, perhaps, for Henry Kissinger and some lesser known participants, everyone is gone. McNamara now joins McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, Walt Rostow, Bill Westmoreland & Co. in that great DMZ in the sky.

Vietnam became so unpopular because to the average American, there was no end in sight. In World War II everyone could look at maps in their daily newspapers and weekly magazines and quickly understand why massive armies and navies were closing in on Germany and Japan. In the late 1960s and early 1970s an ever-growing number of Americans came to realize the original argument for sending hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops into this small country in Southeast Asia was making less and less sense. The argument was that we needed to stop communism in Vietnam and, more importantly, from it spreading throughout Southeast and Southern Asia. Hawks back then used to say things like "if we don't stop them in Vietnam, in three years they'll be in Hawaii." I used to try and envision boatloads of Vietnamese communists puttering across several thousand miles of the Pacific as part of an invasion armada focusing in on Honolulu and how the sophisticated U.S. Navy would be useless in stopping them.

Vietnam, by Ho Chi Minh's own admission, was a war of nationalism, not monolithic communism, and was designed to give the Vietnamese the right to their land and to control their destiny free from the likes of the Chinese, Dutch, Japanese, French and the Americans who for centuries had colonized the country.

Ho had told the French right after WWII when it was obvious that he and the Viet Minh were going to take up arms to kick the French out of their country that "you will kill 10 of my men and I will kill only one of yours. But in the end, you will tire and leave." After the fall of Dien Bien Phu in the Spring of 1954, the French left. By 1975, we too were very tired and couldn't get out fast enough.

The American policy (and the war) was riddled with false assumptions, hubris and lies. In the end, these caught up with us.

You would think that less than 30 years after we got out, U.S. officials would not have made the same basic mistake again. But we did. I won't bore everyone with Santyana's famous quote about not understanding history and making the same mistake twice. I will say that, like Vietnam, false assumptions, hubris and lies were the platform under which the policy for going to war in Iraq was built. Arguments, documents, investigations and in-depth analysis have today confirmed that the 2003 attack on Iraq, while different in its specific conditions and dynamics than Nam, was still predicated on complete mistruths. A clear example is the following which appeared recently in the New York Daily News. It was forwarded to me by my friend Tom Baines in Oklahoma City, an attorney of note, a former military officer and intelligence wonk, one of a few Democrats in the Sooner state and a man of keen intellect and insight:

Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein Bluffed About WMDs Fearing Iranian Arsenal, Secret FBI Files Show.

Saddam Hussein feared Iran's arsenal more than a U.S. attack, and even considered asking ex-President George W. Bush "to protect" Iraq from its neighbor, once secret FBI files show.

The FBI interrogations of the toppled tyrant - codename "Desert Spider" - were declassified after a Freedom of Information Act request. The records show Saddam happily boasted of duping the world about stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. And he consistently denied cooperating with Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda.

Of all his enemies, Iraq's ex-president - who insisted he still held office during captivity - hated Iran most.

Asked how he would have faced "fanatic" Iranian ayatollahs if Iraq had been proven toothless by UN weapons inspectors in 2003, Saddam said he would have cut a deal with Bush.

"Hussein replied Iraq would have been extremely vulnerable to attack from Iran and would have sought a security agreement with the U.S. to protect it from threats in the region," according to a 2004 FBI report among the declassified files.

Without Bush's help, "Iraq would have done what was necessary," he told FBI Agent George Piro in his Baghdad International Airport cell.

That didn't mean an alliance of evil with Al Qaeda, he insisted months into what he called a "dialogue" with Piro.

The interrogations unfolded in 2004 after his capture the previous December at the same farm where he said he'd hidden after orchestrating a failed 1959 coup plot.

Saddam denied ever laying eyes on the "zealot" Bin Laden, bent on striking the U.S.

He said he "did not have the same belief of vision" as the terror kingpin.

Saddam never sought Al Qaeda assistance because he feared the terror group would turn on him. To protect his country, the more likely ally "would have been North Korea."

Saddam also said the U.S. "used the 9/11 attack as a justification to attack Iraq" and "lost sight of the cause of 9/11."

The U.S. "was not Iraq's enemy," just its policies, Saddam explained.

Asked about WMDs, Saddam insisted: "We destroyed them. We told you."

"By God, if I had such weapons, I would have used them in the fight against the U.S," he added.

McNamara was vilified by the Vietnam anti-war movement. Post death blogger comments the past few days have varied a good deal but certainly there were the predictable "war criminal" and "may he burn in hell with LBJ and Nixon" rants.

I will say this in McNamara's defense. Thirty years after he left the Secretary of Defense post in the Johnson Administration, he publicly admitted he was "wrong. Terribly wrong."

My chances of being alive in thirty years are very slim but I will bet that none of the Bush II crowd...George himself, Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney or Wolfowitz...will every use the word "wrong" when they publicly look back.