And the Robert S. McNamara Memorial Award Goes To:

 

There's been a lot of yakking and babbling about "Who Lost Afghanistan?". It's all wrong. And it's not because we "lost" Afghanistan. It's because it never should have begun, as any sort of "nation-building". Any idea of such is now manifestly and properly discredited as one of the Stupidest Things Ever Thunk. Allow us, therefore, to lay proper blame at the true and rightful owner's feet:

The Raconteur Report takes pride in recognizing the monumental fucktardation of the man most single-handedly responsible for everything that's gone wrong in US SWAsia policy for the last 20 years, by awarding him the Robert S. McNamara Award For Epic Stupidity By A Senior Official.

Just as you knew the train had gone off the rails when 9/11 got us the KGB-esque Patriot Act with our own Homeland Security cheka, instead of a couple new Hiroshimas over Mecca and Medina, you knew Iraq and Afghanistan had gone far beyond Full Retard when this jackass, promoted hopelessly beyond his intelligence and abilities to SecState by epic presidential-level boob Dubbya, in order to provide the illusion of adult supervision, announced that we had to fix things in those shitholes because, and I quote his Pottery Barn rationale as verbatim as I can recollect, "You break it, you bought it."

This is logic from four-year-olds and store clerks, not geopolitical strategists.

The correct answer would have been to carpet-bomb both nations from 30,000' until nothing worth bombing remained, and then detail a BDA team to put up a sign saying "Don't make us ever come back here, or you'll need lead-lined underpants."

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The Award's Namesake:

Robert Strange McNamara *spit!* was a dedicated public servant. Which was exactly the problem with him. Before entering government service, he was a Harvard Business School grad, and the president of Ford Motor Company, back when they were a great American company.

His crowning achievement there was to unveil the Edsel.

For Millenials and Common Core grads, the Edsel was the most colossal brand flop in automobile manufacturing history.

Brighter lights would call that little misadventure a "clue".

But then, Camelot, and suddenly, JFK wanted the bumbling business idiot - who shared his Harvard roots - to head our defense establishment as SecDef.

While occasionally stumbling into success there with the reliability of a blind pig hunting acorns, his most notable achievements there involved him trying to do things far beyond his knowledge or capabilities, which lack was vast and wide, as befits a man of very little brain and worldwide responsibility. 

A few spectacular career highlights:

*Convincing LBJ that we could win in Vietnam, and ought to play there.

*Adopting the M-16 service rifle. Which only took from 1965 until 1983 to properly unfuck.

*Forcing the Air Farce and the Navy to use the same airplanes for completely different missions, particularly the horrendously complex, over-tasked, overweight, and under-performing F-111. (F-35 Thunderjug program aficionados, stop me if you've heard this one.) Eventually, when it became apparent even to blind retards the idea would never work, the CNO and SecNav told him to go fuck himself.

*Enlisted and drafted 100,000 literal retards to fight in the Army in Vietnam. (cf. McNamara's Retards). Now, we only use them as generals and admirals in the Pentagon.

*Told the Joint Chiefs that technology could win the fight to stop supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, forgetting that the North Vietnamese had pushed howitzers by hand uphill through the jungle to defeat the French at Dien Bien Phu, and utterly unaware that the NVA were pushing thousands of tons of war supplies from the North to the South by strapping them to bicycles with bamboo poles tied across the handlebars, and which didn't show up on radar or ground sensors looking for trucks.

*Was thus totally unprepared for the 1968 Tet Offensive, in which the entirety of South Vietnam was attacked simultaneously by thousands of VC McNamara's numbers crunching told him couldn't actually be there, which coupled with Enemedia action on American TV, convinced all of America that the war was eternal and unwinnable. He left DoD at the end of February, just short, unfortunately, of doing the honorable thing and shooting himself in the head.

*In return for cutting a campaign ad for presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy, he failed upwards to head the World Bank, where he spent the next thirteen years bankrupting one nation after another with loans they could never repay, at rates they couldn't afford, and spawning a chain of failed states, poverty, hunger, famine, disease, and worldwide chaos so gargantuan that the Soviets, Chinese, and Clinton Family Crime Syndicate were left green with envy.

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Colon Powell has now risen to those heights, whereas had he contented himself with being Chairman of the JCS, he could have died remembered as the architect who destroyed Saddam Hussein's Sixth Largest Army In The World in six weeks, from behind his desk.

Award of the Peter Principal Ribbon with oak leaf cluster and Fucktard "F" is also authorized.

Success has many fathers, but epic failure is never an orphan. It is, in fact, the love child you always get when you screw the pooch this hard. We are happy, in this case, to correctly and properly identify the father.