Thursday, August 19, 2021

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."

_____

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.

_____

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.

14 comments:

GMay said...

Surely the entire general and flag officer corps, to include Thoroughly Postmodern Milley should get some sort of consolation prize, or participation trophy?

Aesop said...

Absolutely, but the fruit all springs from the poisoned root.

Anonymous said...

And people weee us Hong for him to be president!

Mark said...

The thing is (and I said this 20 years ago) that nation building CAN work, we have two excellent examples of it. Japan and Germany, 1945-present. Now two prosperous nations.

In Iraq and Afghanistan we didn't engage in nation building, we were nation remodeling. Just as with a house, BUILDING requires you bulldoze whatever's already there (trees, stumps, old houses, etc) and start fresh, new foundation, new walls, roof, floors, etc. Remodeling means you keep some of the house you already have, tack on an addition, add an additional story, put on new siding.

The analogy gets even better: Just as with a house, nation remodeling works just fine as long as the parts you keep are sound. So back in 1776-1787 when we set about creating the USA, we kept those concepts we got from the British, rule of law, representative government, Western Civilization and adjusted them to our needs (tossed the king in the dumpster, along with hereditary titles and such).

Iraq and A'stan didn't need remodeling, they needed rebuilding, and we failed to bulldoze. So we kept the tribal bullshit under the guise of the Religion of Peace (tm) instead of doing as the Skinny One suggested where the bomb them to the stone age (not a big jump) and convert them to Christianity.

Just as anyone who watch Gulf War 1 knew, when we stopped at the Iraq border and left Saddam in charge, that we'd be back in a few years, anyone with half a brain knew that leaving former Afghan leaders in charge was going to turn south as soon as we left. Sometimes one hates being right.

Sorry for the rant Aesop, like you I've been watching this for 20 years while waiting for the epic fuster-cluck I knew was coming.

Mark D

MSG Grumpy said...

While I agree entirely with the nomination of this Affirmative Action Asshole owning this disaster as Patter Familiar...

But one of the more loathsome bastard children of this POS is a certain Scottie
(May he be drawn and Quartered
for his part in this Destruction of the Military and our Country).

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/08/general-scottie-miller-recommended-closing-bagram-air-force-base-left-afghanistan-july-expected-retire-soon/

OldChemo said...

And let's not forget SecState Powell pushing the bogus "yellow cake uranium" and "OMG, mobile bio-weapons laboratories" during his speeches, a factor which helped sway public opinion to support the launch of the coalition into the 2003 Iraq adventure.
regards/ OldChemo

Aesop said...

@Mark.

Just...no.
Japan and Germany both started as functional nations, with histories stretching back hundreds to thousands of years.

Iran and Afghanistan are just the leftover bits on a map that exist only in Western fictional accounts. They have never been nations, and never will be.

"Bulldozing" there would have to include genocide, and ADMs, then starting with smaller mammal species, until the topography could support a balanced predator-and-prey food pyramid sufficient for human recolonization.

NTTAWWT.

But using the original cast of characters?

With A-stan: Wall them in, enforce a No Exit Zone, and let them kill each other off until they succeed. Nothing in, nothing out, forever.

Iraq should be partitioned three ways, Shiites, Sunnis, and including creating Kurdistan, because anything that simultaneously pisses off Iran, Russia, and Turkey is solid gold, and clearly in US interests for the region.

And then deal with the parcels as necessary.

millerized said...

Adk him and Schwartznheimer about Khamisiyah and what troops were where. Shit they both sat on while good people suffered.

GMay said...

Really shocked to see someone floating that Germany/Japan non-parallel in this day and age. Not that the host didn't adequately handle this, but I'm in a mild piling on mood.

Germany was part of the modern world, and Japan was rapidly catching up from a desire to be a part of that world.

Iraq, Afghanistan, and a whole massive chunk of planetary landmass over there aspires to replay the greatest hits of the 7th century. Iron age tribal bandits don't give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about purple thumbs, functional economies, or the modesty of goats. The only thing that works is to fly over there make the rocks bounce every few years so that they can't export their decapitation fetish.

Anonymous said...

McNamara also was the "brains" behind the McNamara Line on the Vietnamese DMZ. He dictated his static defense strategy there to Lew Walt and others who wanted more freedom of maneuver in I Corps. Our Marines had to sit on an exposed hill at Con Tien and take a beating from 130mm guns hidden on the other side of the DMZ beyond the range of our 105mm batteries. A certain Mr. Barry who published an underground publication in the 1990's went so far as to blame McNamara for killing of the old American military ethic of Duty,Honor,Country in the military and replacing it with a corporate mindset modeled after what existed at the Ford Motor Company.
As for C.Powell, we he was the guy that suggested to the elder Bush after the "Highway of Death" images made the news, that we should stop the encirclement of Saddam's forces and end the fighting before negative public opinion kicked in. That encirclement and the capture of Basra would have been an accomplished fact within 24 hours if it had not been stopped and Saddam would have lost most of his Republican Guard and his oil fields. His regime would have been hard pressed to survive without these assets and the later attacks on the SHia and Kurd rebels would have been much more difficult. I believe that finishing that encirclement would have prevented the 2003 War if it had taken place. Powell was also giving out terrible advise to politicians during the Somalia fiasco.

Anonymous said...

The major difference is that Japan and Germany were nations, with a high trust social background, while Iraq and AStan were Balfours' lines on the ground, encompassing multiple low trust warring tribes vieing for control, all under an 8th century religion bent on conquest.
Our society is not based on democracy. It is based on the stability of ownership of property, on the stability of our legal and court systems, and on our ability to trust even a stranger to abide by our common rules and understandings.
The Prog/communists are trying to undermine all of this.
Identify the enemy, from local levels on up. Do not cooperate in your own destruction.
John in Indy

Anonymous said...

We did it right for the first six months or so. SF went in, linked up with the opposition and supported their destruction of the Taliban as a gov. At that point we should have said,

"Bye, now. Oh, and if we have to come back because you decided to send assholes to jihad in the US, we'll be back and fuck your shit up worse."

We could have left some SF to help the locals build their villages up to defend, but that's it.

Big Army, etc... had to go in to get their war badges, and unearned promotions.

Bones

lynn said...


And I agree. My son's first sergeant tried for four hours to get him to "volunteer" for a three month mini tour in Afghanistan after his second trip to Iraq. My son wisely told him "No !". They needed more Marines to replace the seven Marines killed and a bunch injured in a ambush in a valley by the Taliban. The first and last humvees were blown up and two Russian built .50 cal machine guns raked the convoy. Major screwup by the Marine commander, not a good man to go work for.

C said...

"Bulldozing" there would have to include genocide, and ADMs, then starting with smaller mammal species, until the topography could support a balanced predator-and-prey food pyramid sufficient for human recolonization."

It's not a terrible idea...