Robert Strange McNamara: Dominatrix
Peter Schultz
The following is from JFK and Vietnam by John M. Newman, and it describes a Joint Chiefs of Staff memo sent to President Kennedy on January 13, 1962 arguing that it was essential for the United States to commit combat forces to Vietnam.
“In it the Chiefs described the stakes in Vietnam as incredibly high, and said they had done all they could under the restraints of the President’s program….Their solution, of course, was to send U.S. combat troops to Vietnam….Since the prevention of communist domination in South Vietnam was an ‘inalterable objective’ of the United States…,the military objective ‘must be to take expeditiously all actions necessary to defeat communist aggression there.’ The Chiefs stated categorically that ‘the fall of South Vietnam to communist control would mean the eventual communist domination of all of the Southeast Asian mainland.’ U.S. allies and neutral India would be ‘outflanked,’ and the last significant British military strength in Asia would be ‘eliminated’ with the loss of Singapore and Malaya. Then all of the Indonesian archipelago would come under Soviet ‘domination.’” [p. 163]
This is an excellent example of what might called “the domination myth.” According to this mindset, domination is not only possible, but it even seems to be the all-too-common result of political activity. So, unless the U.S. committed itself, in the strongest way possible militarily, against communist forces in Southeast Asia, then willy nilly Southeast Asia would fall under the domination of the communists and the Soviet Union. Moreover, this myth is evident not only in the analysis of the communist threat but is also evident in the Chiefs’ recommendations for military action via combat troops. That is, if the U.S. opposes the communists, then the U.S. can and will dominate Southeast Asia. Failure to dominate, either by the communists or by the U.S., isn’t entertained as a possibility.
So, even more so than what was called “the domino theory,” whereby the nations of Southeast Asia would “fall over” like a row of dominoes one after the other once South Vietnam “fell” to the communists, the domination myth lay at the bottom of the thinking that led the U.S. into a war in Southeast Asia, a war that it eventually lost. It is this myth that helps explain why failure and its consequences were never analyzed by U.S. policy makers, and especially not by Robert McNamara, JFK’s Secretary of Defense. Convinced that if the U.S. committed itself to war in Southeast Asia it could not lose, McNamara, despite a lot of evidence that should have told him the U.S. was losing that war, pushed on and on and on. The domination myth made McNamara act like a dominatrix, as it were, thinking and acting as if he could control, i.e., dominate the North Vietnamese, the Soviets, the Chinese, and eventually all of Southeast Asia. Domination is the key to success, in politics and other activities, so it is best to have a “dominatrix” in control. And it was McNamara who was thought to possess the expertise required as he allegedly demonstrated during WW II and in his career at Ford Motor Company.
The implications of the domination myth are widespread. Consider, for example, the phenomenon labeled “transgenderism.” It seems indisputable that what we call “gender” is, well, “slippery” or often ambiguous, with more than a few humans feeling that the gender they were assigned at birth isn’t their actual gender and so, sometimes, these humans seek to “transition” to their actual gender. But this assumes that the gender we are born with, however ambiguous or arbitrary, can be changed. That is, it is assumed that we humans can and should dominate our gender issues, just as we can and should dominate our political issues. The U.S. failure in Vietnam – and elsewhere – might indicate that domination isn’t always possible and certainly isn’t always desirable.
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