Robert McNamara Dies | 07/06/2009 9:40 am

Robert McNamara, Ex-Kennedy Defense Secretary, Vietnam War Architect, Dies at Age 93

Many of McNamara’s good deeds were overshadowed by mass escalation of increasingly unpopular Vietnam War.

By The Staff at wowOwow.com

Kennedy family confidant and former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara died in his sleep today at the age of 93.

"His age just caught up with him," his wife Diana, told Reuters. "He was not ill. He died peacefully in his sleep."

McNamara served as a key architect of the U.S. war in Vietnam — sometimes called "McNamara’s War" — which left 58,000 Americans dead. He served under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and also advised JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union were on the brink of nuclear war. McNamara also became the first outsider to become president of the family-run Ford Motor company, served as president of the World Bank, and was a nuclear arms expert. As defense secretary, he boosted the Pentagon’s nuclear arsenal and streamlined the agency.

When Kennedy took office, only 500 Americans were in the South Asian nation, but by the time McNamara left his post in 1968, there were more than 500,000. Although he and other U.S. officials portrayed the Vietnam War as a necessary anti-communism battle in the Cold War, McNamara acknowledged later that they underestimated Vietnamese nationalism and opposition to the U.S.-backed government in Saigon.

"The conflict within South Vietnam itself had all of the characteristics of a civil war, and we didn’t look upon it as largely a civil war, and we weren’t measuring our progress as one would have in what was largely a civil war," he told CNN.

McNamara is survived by three children and his second wife, whom he married in 2004.

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Marjorie, there is proof of WMD’s…

For years, the media and Democrats have sold the public an understanding that Gerorge W. Bush fabricated a story that Saddam Hussein had a WMD program in order to justify invading Iraq, which invasion then becomes "based on a lie."

About 550 metric tons of yellowcake concentrated uranium were recently shipped out of Iraq. It had been part of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program. That much was recently reported by the Associated Press . I wrote an article for American Thinker that commented on that story the day it appeared.

That yellowcake stockpile pre-dated 1991, and had been under the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency "safeguard" from then until 2003. That was mentioned in the AP article and I mentioned it in the update to my article the day it was published. In fact, American Thinker contributors Douglas Hanson and Rick Moran had written about that yellowcake stockpile years ago here, here and here. Douglas Hanson reported four years ago:

"Professor Norman Dombey, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Sussex, England, has confirmed that Saddam Hussein had more than enough yellowcake uranium to make over 100 nuclear weapons." There’s more…. http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/07/the_550_tons_of_yellowcake.html

By deber B on 07/06/2009 2:12 pm

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Ah, gee, deber, you forgot to include the disclaimer and at the end these authors of this article do say they are just conjecturing:

"Of course there was lots of yellow cake in Iraq . Those news orgs you so dislike reported five years ago on how tons of it was just sitting out in the open in Tawaitha. It was so accessible that the locals were looting the site. Most of the articles at that time were critical of the lack of security from U.S. troops for the former nuclear development site. Please note the word former…it’s pretty important since former was the word you could use in 2000 as well. Anyway, that isn’t news. Neither is the fact that Saddam had delivery mechanisms. However, he did not have an active nuclear weapons program, unless one means the capacity to deliver one or two dirty bombs (which the yellow cake couldn’t be used for, btw, because it is basically an inert compound). But even dirty bombs aren’t a particularly scary threat, since you or I or anyone else could buy materials for dirty bombs at Home Depot. But Saddam just didn’t have the resources to do anything more than that due to IAEA inspections and other international efforts. In fact, he didn’t have any technology or raw materials dating anytime after 1991. He was technologically impotent. Which means the UN’s efforts, so belittled by the Bush administration in the ramp-up to invasion (as well as by revisionist neocon historians…?) had worked exactly as intended. So the "American Thinker" article is really a great example of precisely the distorted sort of ranting that it tries to claim is nobly contrary to popular sentiment but somehow true. But it’s not true. It’s simply bizarre."

By phyllis Doyle Pepe on 07/06/2009 2:48 pm

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"The United States has found 500 chemical weapons in Iraq since 2003, and more weapons of mass destruction are likely to be uncovered, two Republican lawmakers said Wednesday.

"We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons," Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., said in a quickly called press conference late Wednesday afternoon.

Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Santorum said: "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist."

• Click here to read the declassified portion of the NGIC report.

He added that the report warns about the hazards that the chemical weapons could still pose to coalition troops in Iraq.

"The purity of the agents inside the munitions depends on many factors, including the manufacturing process, potential additives and environmental storage conditions. While agents degrade over time, chemical warfare agents remain hazardous and potentially lethal," Santorum read from the document.

"This says weapons have been discovered, more weapons exist and they state that Iraq was not a WMD-free zone, that there are continuing threats from the materials that are or may still be in Iraq," said Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.The weapons are thought to be manufactured before 1991 so they would not be proof of an ongoing WMD program in the 1990s. But they do show that Saddam Hussein was lying when he said all weapons had been destroyed, and it shows that years of on-again, off-again weapons inspections did not uncover these munitions."

There’s more…

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2006/06/22/report-hundreds-wmds-iraq/

By deber B on 07/06/2009 3:00 pm

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deber: give it a rest. this is old news––2006 to be exact. We know by now the the results of all this. The bottom line is we were hoodwinked into this war and it’s water under the bridge.

By phyllis Doyle Pepe on 07/06/2009 5:04 pm

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Sorry, phyllis, but I will never give "truth" a rest. You believe what you want to believe. There is more documentation.

By deber B on 07/06/2009 5:15 pm

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Santorum wouldn’t know the truth if it bit him on the ass.

By F P on 07/08/2009 7:43 am

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Be nice, fp

By deber B on 07/08/2009 8:25 am

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Yes, it was documented yet, again, in 2006. You can’t reinvent history.

By deber B on 07/06/2009 5:26 pm

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Phyllis what about letters I have from a friend who served in the 1st Gulf War that state he was sitting in Kuwait on the Iraq border watching Iraq soldiers making WMD’s with agent orange? Did he lie? The chemicals to make WMD’s were there but from what I recall Bush wanted to go into Iraq in January but had to wait until March so that gave Sadam enough time to get most of his WMD’s out…My hubby’s unit was supposed to protect the Iraq/Turkey border but his unit got held back, wonder what kind of stuff his unit would have seen coming across the border???

By C Hardy on 07/06/2009 5:58 pm

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Interesting, C — how exactly did your friend "know" the Iraq soldiers were making WMD’s with agent orange? What would be the rationale for Iraq soldiers making WMD right out in the open? Right along the border where they knew American soldiers could see? Or, do you think that might have been part of Sadam’s fake out regarding WMD?

By MK P on 07/07/2009 10:03 am

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Seems we are quite off-topic here from the title of the article. Let’s get back on-topic please…

By Community Manager on 07/07/2009 10:49 am

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phyllis: we were hoodwinked into this war…

By whom?

By Marjorie C. on 07/07/2009 5:46 am

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By Georgie, Dick, the neocons and the list goes on and on Marjorie.

By F P on 07/07/2009 8:34 am

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deber: yellowcake stockpile

I wasn’t sure of the details, but I do remember that it was recently reported that Hussein bragged for years of having WMDs because he wanted to impress/scare Iran. So, Bush and the members of Congress of both parties who signed on were not totally hoodwinked by some lying entity. Who knew Hussein was misrepresenting the truth, that what he had were old stockpiles of the components WMDs — potential WMDs, as it were.

Thanks for the report.

By Marjorie C. on 07/06/2009 4:38 pm

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Marjorie, supposedly intelligent people still discount documented information from the government, no less, that WMD’s existed. If you will recall, Saddam Hussein refused inspections for quite a few years….until he, of course, moved the goods. Once the IAEA put their foot door and said, "No more delays" did Saddam have to accept the inspections.

What is also remarkable is that democrats think that George Bush, on his own, without approval, staged the war in Iraq. How laughable is that? There isn’t a dead president or any president alive today who can orchestrate a war without massive approval.

The war in Iraq was necessary and America made a difference in the lives of the Iraqi people. Eyes on Iran and the long and arduous infrastructure of Afghanistan. If you thought Iraq cost alot of money to the taxpayers wait until Obama ends his term in 2012. I’ll take George Bush’s deficit any day compared to what Obama will hand off to the next president.

By deber B on 07/06/2009 5:22 pm