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Robert McNamara's other body count
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McNamara: Technocratic expert in both soft and hard kill techniques
As the former Secretary of Defense under Johnson, Robert McNamara will always be be remembered for advocating and implementing hard kill policies against defenseless civilians. In Vietnam he oversaw the bombardment of both South and North Vietnam, implemented a policy of using the chemical weapon Agent Orange on crops and on the people of Vietnam, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths and hundreds and thousands of birth defects. McNamara will be remembered for the Napalm, for the My Lai Massacre, and ultimately for the failure of US Imperialism.
But it should be remembered that McNamara's viciousness did not end when he resigned from Johnson's White House. It should be remembered that his next Job was with the World Bank, and that while McNamara was merciless and shrewd as a bureaucrat tasked with formulating hot kill policies, he took the challenges of the position he filled from 1968 to 1980 just as seriously.
To be clear, the goal of the World Bank was to lead impoverished or underdeveloped nations and peoples into the utopia that was competition on the global market. If this often meant an intensification of misery and the destruction of civil society in the countries blessed by the Bank's loans, well sometimes the Bank had to destroy the village in order to save it.
Those world leaders who stood in the way of the Bank's agenda made sure that their people would not receive assistance or loans, and those leaders who went along were sure to usher in World Bank Money.
For example: The World Bank suspended lending to Chile from 1970 to 1973 following the election of Salvador Allende. When Allende nationalized the Copper mines, provided National Health Care, and started funding public schools McNamara's World Bank stopped supporting the country, and it was not until Allende was assassinated and the military dictator Pinochet took power that the Bank began to loan to Chile again. McNamara could depend Pinochet to implement the "reforms" tied to such loans.
This is the second half of McNamara's legacy. And it should not be forgotten that one of history's great war butchers was also instrumental in implementing the neo-liberal policies that not only immiserated much of the Third World, but were also part of the deindustrializing of America.
Robert McNamara's dual legacy is important to understand today. As the we face the expansion of pointless butchery in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the destruction of the public safety net and the impoverisionment of the US public, we would do well to look at both sides of McNamara. Such knowledge is, at this point, a matter of self defense.
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