Vietnam war criminal Robert McNamara dies at 93

On the morning of July 6, Vietnam War criminal Robert McNamara died at the age of 93. McNamara was a much hated and rabid anti-communist who dedicated his life to U.S. imperialism as president of Ford Motors, secretary of defense and director of the World Bank.

War criminal Robert McNamara is dead

As defense secretary, McNamara was one of the architects of the Vietnam War. During the Democratic Kennedy and Johnson administrations, his department propped up the brutal and unpopular client regime in South Vietnam through joint campaigns of terror and torture. He gave the go-ahead for massive bombing campaigns and the widespread use of chemical weapons that devastated the country, killing at least 4 million Vietnamese and over 1 million Laotians and Cambodians.

McNamara helped sell the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident as a pretext for the war of aggression on Vietnam. He also orchestrated the 1962 U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba that was defeated by Cuban revolutionary forces.

According to the July 7 New York Times, McNamara increased the Pentagon’s budget from $48.4 billion in 1962 to $74.9 billion in 1968—a figure equal to $457 billion in today’s dollars. This included a massive expansion in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

As the Vietnam War continued, the well-organized resistance of Vietnamese liberation fighters and the growing resistance amongst U.S. troops increasingly demoralized U.S. military planners. McNamara became increasingly doubtful of the U.S. military’s ability to win the war, which subsequently led to his resignation from the Defense Department in 1968.

McNamara then assumed the presidency of the World Bank for the next 13 years. In most mainstream media, reporters glorified this change in career path as more ethically responsible, or a humanitarian change of heart from his previous job as a warmonger.

In fact, it was business as usual at the World Bank for McNamara. In his new job, he honed the imperialist bank into a weapon that helped dominate and take over the economies of oppressed countries through massive loans. McNamara also helped develop the strategy of economic “restructuring” that imposed “free market reforms” favorable to U.S. corporations when countries defaulted on the World Bank loans. Under the guidance of McNamara, the World Bank helped enforce whole countries dependence on the United States.

Finally, in 2003, Robert McNamara was interviewed in the Errol Morris documentary film, “The Fog of War.” Here, McNamara thoroughly explains the corruption of U.S. military power and his role in destroying the lives of thousands of U.S. troops as well as millions of Vietnamese. He openly confessed to committing war crimes. While his admissions in the film serve as very helpful insight into the system and the man who was responsible for a multitude of war crimes during the Vietnam War era, it doesn’t do any justice for the Vietnamese people. Every single defense secretary since McNamara is also guilty of war crimes—it comes with the job.

Capitalist criminals like McNamara should be held accountable and tried for their crimes. Imperialism’s long list of injustices plotted in the Oval Office, the Pentagon, the State Department, Defense Department and many other places in Washington demand that billions of dollars be paid in reparations to Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines, Cuba, Panama, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan and many, many other countries.