From a 1996
conversation with Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy administration:
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I know it's hard in a brief interview, but in a nutshell, what went wrong with our goals and why couldn't we adjust them as things began to go bad?
What went wrong was a basic misunderstanding or misevaluation of the threat to our security represented by the North Vietnamese pressure on South Vietnam. It led President Eisenhower in 1954 to say that if Vietnam were lost, or if Laos and Vietnam were lost, the dominoes would fall. That was a famous expression. It wasn't just President Eisenhower who believed it; I'll call it the establishment in the U.S. It didn't matter whether you were Republican or Democrat, if you had been associated with foreign relations and responsibilities in the postwar period and were dealing with the Soviet threat to the security to the West [then you believed in the "Domino Theory"]. It was a very real threat, there's no question of that. I think we all, in the fifties and sixties, may have exaggerated it, but there was no question that it was a threat.
During the seven years I was Secretary, on three occasions we came very very close to war with the Soviet Union. They put pressure on West Berlin to take West Berlin from NATO in August of 1961, we came close to war then. They introduced nuclear weapons into Cuba and we came close to nuclear war with the Soviets then -- that was in October of 1962. They were backing Egypt to destroy Israel, eliminate it from the face of the earth, in June of 1967; the hotline was used for the first time in connection with that. The message from Kosygin, the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, to Johnson was "If you want war you'll get it." So we faced what we considered a terrible threat to Western security from the Soviet Communists and the Chinese Communists. I think we exaggerated, but to some degree it was real.
But with respect to Southeast Asia, I am certain we exaggerated the threat. Had we never intervened, I now doubt that the dominoes would have fallen; I doubt that all of Asia would have fallen under Communist control. I doubt that the security of the West would have been materially and adversely affected had we not intervened, or had we withdrawn after it became clear that we were having serious problems militarily. That was our major error.
Now why did it occur? Well it occurred for many reasons, but one of them was that we didn't know our opposition. We didn't understand the Chinese, we didn't understand the Vietnamese, particularly the North Vietnamese. So the first lesson is know your opponents. I want to suggest to you that we don't know our potential opponents today. We don't understand the Chinese today. In the way we've been behaving, I don't know who is more stupid: the Chinese, the Taiwanese, or ourselves. Live warheads were being shot into the Taiwan Straits within the past week or two. There was a threat of Chinese military action against Taiwan. There was action in the Congress that gave every reason to believe that if there were Chinese military action against Taiwan we would go to war with China. Over what, for what reason, with what benefit to whom? With what cost? We don't understand China today. As for Bosnia, do we understand the Serbs, or Croats, or Muslims today? I doubt it, I don't think so. Do we understand the Muslim fundamentalists today? I don't think so. I think this country is quite ignorant of many of the facets of the world that we must gain greater knowledge of if we are to act intelligently and responsibly in relation to other cultures.
As if it were possible to gain such knowledge.
From Snow (2002) by Orhan Pamuk (translated by Maureen Freely):
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I bought my ticket and a sandwich for the little dog my friend had mentioned in his poem. The dog wagged his curly tail happily as he approached me, and I was still feeding him the sandwich when I saw Turgut Bey and Kadife rushing into the station. They'd only just heard from Zahide that I'd gone. We exchanged a few pleasantries about the ticket agent, the journey, the snow. Turgut Bey reached shamefacedly into his pocket and pulled out a new edition of First Love, the Turgenev novel he'd translated from the French while he was in prison. Ömercan was sitting on Kadife's lap, and I stroked his head. His mother's head was wrapped in one of her elegant Istanbul scarves, and the snow it had collected was falling from the edges. Afraid to look too long into his wife's beautiful eyes, I turned back to Fazil and asked him whether he knew now what he might want to say to my readers if I ever was to write a book set in Kars.
"Nothing." His voice was determined.
When he saw my face fall, he relented. "I did think of something, but you may not like it," he said. "If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I'd like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away."
"But no one believes in that way what he reads in a novel," I said.
"Oh, yes, they do," he cried. "If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I've just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds."
I promised I would put what he'd said into my novel.
When Kadife saw me eyeing the station entrance, she came toward me. "I hear you have a beautiful little daughter called Rüya," she said. "My sister isn't coming, but she asked me to send warm wishes to you and your daughter. And I brought you this memento of my short theatrical career." She gave me a photograph of herself with Sunay Zaim on the stage of the National Theater.
The stationmaster blew the whistle. I think I was the only one boarding the train. One by one, I embraced them. At the last moment, Fazil passed me a plastic bag; inside were copies he'd made of the videos and a ballpoint pen that had once belonged to Necip.
By now the train was moving, and it took some effort to jump into the car with my hands so full of presents. They were all standing on the platform waving, and I leaned out the window to wave back. It was only at the last moment that I saw the charcoal-colored dog, its pink tongue hanging from its mouth. It ran happily alongside me, right to the end of the platform. They all disappeared into the thick-falling snow.
I sat down and as I looked out the window through the snow at the orange lights of the outermost houses of the outlying neighborhoods, the shabby rooms full of people watching television, and the last snow-covered rooftops, the thin and elegantly quivering ribbons of smoke rising from the broken chimseys at last seemed a smudge through my tears.
From a 1989
conversation with Ralf Dahrendorf
Quote
Let me ask you one final question. Drawing on your experience, your career as a scholar, your work at the university, if you were addressing a group of young adults, as you actually do in your new book, what message would you like to leave them with in regard to the future world, this liberal agenda, and their preparation for it?
A very simple message, despite the word which I'm now going to use, and a very anti-cyclical message: Live with complexity. Don't try to simplify the world into one in which you live in a homogeneous ethnic environment and with very simple beliefs and convictions, because that is a world of war and destruction. The world is complicated. We've got to appreciate that it is complicated. One of my visions is a return of a sort of Gladstone approach to politics, and I am thinking of Gladstone the campaigner who gave long, long lectures, I'm almost tempted to say to his constituency, about distant parts of the world, explaining the complications of these distant parts. And, while it's very unpopular these days in view of fundamentalism and protectionism and the desire for homogeneity to say so, I think the great counter-cyclical task which the moral minorities have is to spread the message of complexity. The world isn't simple, nor should it be simple. It's rich because it's complicated. Let us somehow manage to live with that.
I really like this message.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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