Book review on Goodreads

Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy by Robert S. McNamara
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

When In Retrospect first came out, some of the people at the college where I teach came up to me and said: "Did you hear? McNamara's published a book and he says the Viet Nam War was all a mistake!" Whoa - talk about your late-breaking news! Still, I suppose hearing those sentiments from the highest levels imparts a certain power to them that us lowly grunts could never hope to possess - but I think I recall saying "this is a big mistake" on my first patrol (I served in 'Nam in '68-'69).

The rub, of course, comes when we try to figure out WHY it was a mistake, and it is here that McNamara can give us something truly significant. That is his stated intent in this book. Does he? I think he does, but what he has to give us has been dished up many times before.

In preparation for this book, McNamara instituted a series of conferences between policy makers active during the "McNamara Years", from the U.S. and North Viet Nam. McNamara's stated goal is to search for "lost opportunities". Were there ways to avoid U.S. entanglement; or, having become entangled, were there ways for the U.S. to disengage before so many lives were lost? McNamara's idea here is to find those lost opportunities and lay them before the public.

So, it was with excitement that I read this book - maybe, finally, McNamara will come clean. And come clean he does, though not in the way he intended.

I knew I would have a different reaction to this book when I read how shocked McNamara was to learn the North Vietnamese side of the argument wanted to start in 1945 in the search for missed opportunities. McNamara's original intent was to limit discussion to the years 1961 - 1967; his years as Secretary of Defense. Here we have a sense of the man's over-arching ego; nothing important could have occurred before or after those dates. It is simply beyond my comprehension how the so-called "best and brightest" could be surprised at the date of 1945. For those of you who don't know, that's the date when the Vietnamese, under Ho Chi Minh, declared themselves independent of France, using words from the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration on the Rights of Man. That is the date that Bao Dai, the last emperor of Viet Nam, formally abdicated his throne and anointed Ho Chi Minh as his successor. That is the date when Ho Chi Minh made direct appeals to President Truman to ensure the rights of the Vietnamese were respected. It is a date that is no secret now, and wasn't then.

How, then, could the chief architect of American policy towards Viet Nam be so awesomely ignorant of such an important starting point? The answer to that question is one of the lessons one might draw from the war: U.S. policy makers had no interest in Viet Nam per se. It was merely a stage, upon which the righteous Americans would meet and defeat the forces of "the Evil Empire". The McNamaras and the Rusks and the Rostows felt no need to learn anything about their potential adversary - to our ultimate sorrow. Know Thy Enemy. That lesson is nothing new; applied to this specific war, one can find it in Fire in the Lake, Frances FitzGerald's excellent work about the war published in 1971. What is new is McNamara's bald admission that he really had no interest in learning about the Vietnamese, nor did anyone else in the American administrations.

Another interesting part of the book is McNamara's complete lack of understanding at the refusal of the North Vietnamese to negotiate while we were bombing them. Despite the numerous lessons about the failure of strategic bombing to shorten wars and "force" the enemy to the negotiating table, America pursued the continued bombing of North Viet Nam in order to accomplish those self-same goals. All of this was known to McNamara and his cronies, and yet they allowed the strategic bombing of North Viet Nam to be one of the major foci of American policy. And now, thirty years after McNamara's involvement in the war, he still doesn't get it.

I wish to touch on just one more facet of Argument Without End. It includes a chapter by Col. Herbert Schandler and McNamara, entitled "U.S. Military Victory in Vietnam: A Dangerous Illusion?" Most of the chapter was written by Schandler, who did his time in 'Nam in the infantry. The answer to the rhetorical question posed in the title is, Yes - a U.S. military victory in Viet Nam is and was a dangerous illusion. I strongly agree with that answer, and I'm glad this chapter is in the book. But, dollars to doughnuts, this chapter won't shut up those deluded folks who think "we could've won if only the military had been allowed to win". This is because Schandler never really answers those critics who contend that the military had its hands tied in Viet Nam. This is too bad, because the answer is not all that difficult to comprehend. If the military had done exactly as it pleased in Viet Nam, we still would have lost. Without the support of the people we were supposed to help, there was no hope. Herein lies another lesson from the war: if we aren't true to our democratic principles in our foreign policy, our foreign policy will fail. We pontificate at great length about "self-determination", but we sure didn't allow it in Viet Nam.

In the end, these two books show Robert Strange McNamara to be not very bright - certainly not the best. They show a man steeped in his own arrogance, and that arrogance in him and those around him cost thousands of American lives and millions of Vietnamese lives. But give the man credit, he doesn't flinch from laying it all before us - even if he doesn't completely understand exactly what it is he's telling us.

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What is the role of government in our lives?

Well, we're starting the 4th day of the government shutdown with all the attendant finger-pointing. Personally, I park this particular monkey squarely on the back of the Tea Party republicans. I get that they don't "like" the Affordable Health Care Act (at least I get that they don't like it - why they don't like it is another matter), but to make funding the operations of the government dependent on de-funding the AHCA strikes me as bordering on disloyalty to the U.S. These are the actions of petulant children, not democratically elected "leaders".

Of course, Tea Party advocates would complain about the ever-encroaching reach of government, and there is some merit to such a view. The difficulty comes from trying to discern where the reach of government has gone too far, where it's just about right, and where it hasn't gone far enough. Tea Party folks take to heart a quote that they often wrongfully attribute to Thomas Jefferson: "That government is best which governs least." - a quote that actually owes it's genesis to an article in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, and which appears in the form often used in Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. It's a thought which many find to be common sense, but in the modern world what does that mean?

What is the role of government in our lives? The most basic role is to defend our liberties, and for that we have the Armed Forces. But wait, defend our liberties (what are those) against what threats? The armed forces are particularly suited to defend our liberties against foreign powers, though one could argue that many times when the armed forces have been employed (at the direction of political leaders) they've been employed to advance the interests of a narrow sub-set of our society and not to protect our liberty. Having "done my part" during the Viet Nam war, I can state that the intent of protecting liberty is there in those that volunteer to serve, and the misuse of that intent is a crime for which they should not be blamed. Nonetheless, the armed forces are there to protect us against foreign threats, and they have done so.

The rub comes from other threats to our liberty. We have an environmental protection agency - is that there to protect our liberty? In my opinion - yes. Rampant pollution threatens not just our liberty, but our lives. We can see what happens when there is no regulation of industry in places such as China, and we've certainly seen it (and still see it) in our country. What about Health and Human Services? Again, when citizens lack access to adequate nutrition, where's their liberty? What about education? Perhaps the biggest threat to liberty is ignorance, and though I think the government has over-reached here (can you say No Child Left Behind?), it is vital for our continued existence to produce an educated public.

I could go on through the various government agencies, but you get the picture (I hope). We face a variety of threats to our liberty and our lives which we as individuals are not capable of addressing. Only the collective power of the government can defend us against those threats, and since we ARE the government, we can determine how much or how little we want government participation in that defense. But government can't do any of that if it's shut down - simply because some zealots don't like a particular act.

Universal health care

Last time, I posted an opinion piece from the NY Times about dissatisfaction in the medical profession. I thought I'd pursue the medical thread a bit more today. As I type, Sen. Cruz from Texas is performing political theater in a "non-filibuster" filibuster to push defunding Obamacare. The broader issue is the role of our government in our lives, and to hear Tea Party advocates and their cronies tell it, universal health care is an unwarranted intrusion by the government. I guess I would be more sympathetic to that argument if the people making it weren't so often the same people against gay marriage (it's ok for the government to tell you who you can or can't marry, but not ok for the government to make sure everyone has access to health care).

The narrower issue is universal health care, and here's the thing I don't understand: why is it possible for most industrialized countries to provide universal health care to their citizens at a fraction of the cost of what we pay? This includes a number of countries which are less "socialistic" than we are. The other question is this: is proper health care a universal human right? How does that fit in with our stated motto of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"? Can one pursue happiness when one is ill and can't get proper care? I recommend watching "Sick around the World" to get some alternative views on this. We've got to do better, and political theater doesn't help in the least.

"It's a textbook case ..."

I'm thinking about textbooks this morning because - well, I'm a teacher who uses textbooks. Not all teachers do - my graduate school professor of medical entomology scorned textbooks and insisted we use the original literature. Each class began with a long list of references which applied to the topic of the day. That is, perhaps, the ideal way to teach, but it's impractical in public schools and in places like my college, where I teach so many courses. I'd lose my mind trying to keep up (actually, I'm pretty close to losing my mind even with the "short cut" of textbooks)!

However, the approach my grad school prof took avoids the main flaws of textbooks, which include being out of date the moment they're published and enshrining incorrect information in the minds of students. Because, let's face it, a "textbook example" is not all it's cracked up to be.

Right now, for example, there's a "debate" raging on a message board I follow about Haeckel's fraudulent drawings of vertebrate embryos. Those drawings (or rather copies of them) made regular appearances in biology textbooks until the relatively recent past. The point the textbook authors (and Haeckel) were trying to make was that the similarity of vertebrate embryos at early stages of development indicates an evolutionary relationship between broad classes of vertebrates (fish, reptiles - including birds - mammals). Haeckel, either consciously (=fraud) or unconsciously (=confirmation bias) over-emphasized that resemblance in his drawings. Creationists have a great time with this "fraud", all the while ignoring the fact that Haeckel was correct in his basic point: the resemblance of vertebrate embryos at early stages of development does indicate an evolutionary relationship. In any case, the continued use of these (copies of) drawings after the exaggerated nature of the drawings was known is but one example of "enshrining incorrect information". These days, most textbooks use actual photographs of the embryos - and guess what? - they show a close resemblance between broad classes of vertebrates indicating an evolutionary relationship between them.

Which begs the question - why did the authors of textbooks continue to use the (copies of) drawings long after their true nature was known? I think there are several reasons. One would be inertia and its cousin - laziness. Once one text author used them, and they seemed effective, all the other text authors would use them too. But effective at what? Well, in one picture students could see how closely related diverse groups of vertebrates are - a picture is worth a thousand words. It was a "good" teaching tool - and that's what textbooks are all about. And that's the second reason - text authors are most interested in teaching, and anything that helps get the point across in a simple way seems like a good idea. Text authors are faced with a big dilemma - how to get complex information across to students in as simple a way as possible? The fact that Haeckel over-emphasized what turns out to be a true phenomenon (as true as anything in science) seems like a minor detail that can be ignored in the face of what the author is trying to convey.

Let me give one more example of "enshrined information" that I think is more problematic: the treatment of Jean Baptiste de Lamarck. When I went through school, Lamarck was always taught at the guy who got it wrong. He's the guy who believed in "use and disuse" and "inheritance of acquired characteristics" and - ha, ha - what a fool! Darwin, on the other hand, didn't believe such nonsense and so we can see how the neck of the giraffe evolved according to Darwinian principles. And then I read On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection ... and - surprise, surprise - use and disuse and inheritance of acquired characteristics were all over that book. I'd been lied to!! Well, the textbook authors didn't intend to lie - they were just looking for a simple way to differentiate between Lamarck and Darwin and hit on those two things because it would be "easy" for students to see the difference. And I suspect many of the text authors didn't even know that what they were presenting was flat-out wrong. After all, they'd been taught the same thing and probably had never read On the Origin ... (many biologists never do!).

It turns out that there are some major differences between Lamarck and Darwin, but they don't include differences in their knowledge (or lack of it) of heredity. Textbooks are ever so slowly coming around to facing the complex nature of the differences between Lamarckian evolution and Darwinian evolution, and that's a good thing. But you can bet your textbook has other wrong information buried in it - not out of bad intent, but simply because the authors are trying to find the balance between presenting complexity in all its twists and turns, and conveying important information in as simple a way as possible.

More Movies!

Netflix supplied "Mr. and Mrs. Iyer" via DVD this week and we got a chance to watch it last night. An Indian film, assessing the post-911 world of conflict between Hindus and Muslims. Mrs. Iyer is riding a bus down from the highlands to go home to her husband. She has their infant son with her. By chance, she's riding with a wildlife photographer who is Muslim and who is casually asked to watch over her by Mrs. Iyer's father in law. All is normal until the bus is stopped due to an outbreak of violence between Muslims and Hindus. The story unfolds from there, raising some interesting moral dilemmas. Definitely worth a look.

Another great foreign flick is "Antonia's Line". This also won best foreign language film, and again with good reason. It's the story of a Dutch community with numerous eccentric characters, held together by a strong matron. A beautiful and moving film!

Moving to Asia, the Japanese film "Departures" is a surprising and ultimately profound movie about things we lose by ignoring tradition, and how we need to adjust to difficult circumstance. I seem to be on a "best foreign language film" kick, because this film also scored that award. When we first watched this, we wondered what we were in for, as the beginning is - shall we say - "unusual". But boy was it worth it. The protagonist takes a job preparing the dead (though he applies thinking it's working for a travel agent) for funerals. He's embarrassed to tell his partner what work he's found. We see him preparing a beautiful "woman" for her funeral - and then the surprises start. Stick with it, you won't regret it!

International movies

Some time ago, I promised I'd "review" some foreign films and it's about time I fulfilled that promise. So - here goes!

First up, perhaps my favorite movie of any type - "The Barbarian Invasions". This movie won "Best Foreign Language Film" (it's French-Canadian), and with good reason. Denys Arcand is the director, and in this film he re-visits some characters he brought to life in "The Decline of the American Empire". A father (who is quite a rake) is quite ill, and his persevering ex-wife contacts their son (a wealthy Londoner) to come to Montreal to help. The film unfolds from there; clearly the son resents his father and the way his father has tom-catted around, and the father resents the capitalistic success of his son. I have rarely seen a film which captures so many human foibles so well as this one. Don't miss it. If you don't like sub-titles, learn French! Arcand is responsible for another very worthy film "Jesus of Montreal". A group of actors puts on the passion play in an unusual manner, and the actors begin to take on the roles they're portraying. Opposition arises, and the results play out like the "real" passion.

Another great one is the Danish film "After the Wedding", directed by Susanne Bier (who has enjoyed some success as a director in the U.S.; "Things we Lost in the Fire"). A man who runs an orphanage in India must travel to Denmark to cozy up to a potentially rich patron, whose donation could drastically improve the lives of the orphans. He reluctantly does so, only to find that the patron has imposed some unusual conditions on the donation (basically - come to my daughter's wedding). This is a surprising and beautiful film, with rich characterization. Bier is also responsible for "In a Better World" and "Brothers". The latter movie was remade by Jim Sheridan in 2009, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman, and Tobey Maguire. The remake pretty much sucks, but the original Danish version is excellent.

Well, darn it, gotta get ready for class. I'll try and post some more great foreign flicks in the near future.

Another day, another mass shooting

One of my facebook friends posted an opinion piece which contends that, despite yet another mass shooting, nothing will change in our political landscape despite the fact that the majority of our citizens support increased control over access to guns. The opinion piece lamented the failure of reason to impact this debate. Here's the news - emotion trumps reason almost every time.

Whenever we feel passionate about something, we employ all kinds of mechanisms to ensure that our passionate feeling is validated. Confirmation bias? Heck yes, I'll have some of that! Selective interpretation of data? Bring it on! I suspect these tendencies have been hard-wired into us, though I don't know why. I see it on both "sides" of the evolution/creation debate, it's evident in the 2nd amendment and 1st amendment debates, and it's obvious in gay rights debates.

The question is, does this matter? Naturally, I think it does, because the two "sides" in most of these debates are not equal. For example, in the "debate" about gay rights, those who oppose gay rights often bring passages from the Bible into the debate, and then intone "love the sinner, hate the sin". But it seems to lead to "hate the sinner, hate the sin." Gays have been paying for their sexual orientation with their lives for much of "civilized" human history. Just today, there's a story about two men being arrested in New York for beating two other men because those two were perceived to be gay. Despite abundant evidence that sexual orientation is no more a "choice" than being black, those who oppose gay rights persist because "it's in the Bible". Point out that wearing cloth made of two different fibers is also a grave sin, according to the Bible, and you'll be ignored; or that particular passage is "not relevant", or needs "interpretation".

Freud was right; we're irrational beings.

Diversity of another kind

I see on the "news" this morning that an American of Indian descent won "Miss America" last night. When I was young, my family used to gather in front of the TV for the Miss America pageant; it was quite a deal in our house (and I suspect in many homes of the day). I think we all wanted for Miss New Mexico to win (which she never did). Then I went off to Viet Nam and the relevance and importance of such a contest went away forever. I think the last time I watched such a pageant was 1965.

But the big news about the pageant this morning (at least in the eyes of CNN) is that a bunch of racists immediately started whining about how a white girl could never win these days - and a white girl would be the only legitimate "Miss America"! Wow - white folks are the only legitimate Americans?! And some of the comments below the CNN story seemed to reinforce this point of view. If I needed further evidence of just how stupid some people are ...

History (both anthropological and biological) tells quite a different story. At the outside, humans of any ethnic origin came to the Americas in the last 15,000 years (some say as "long" ago as 30,000 years). White folks didn't get here until the late 1400's. Our country was nominally founded on the principle that all humans were created equal and the museum at the base of the Statue of Liberty has a plaque which bears the inscription "Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" - no mention of ethnicity. In fact, the poem by Emma Lazarus was deliberately composed by her to emphasize how important it was for the U.S. to accept immigrants (she was prompted to write the poem in a fund-raising effort for the statue by the difficulties she saw Jewish immigrants facing when they came to the U.S. to escape antisemitism in Europe).

Biologically, it's likely that all humans alive today share ancestors who lived 70,000 years ago - a mere eye-blink in evolutionary time. One of the problems I see with people refusing to accept the scientific validity of evolution is that some such people are clearly perpetuating the racism that has prompted these ignorant remarks on CNN and elsewhere.

Of course, not everyone who refuses to accept (scientifically) the theory of evolution is a racist or would support the clowns who think a "Miss America" of Indian descent is another slap at "white pride". But they're missing out on one of the most powerful arguments against racism - evolution.

Diversity

A couple of weeks ago, I assigned a "diversity walk" to my evolution students. They were to spend about an hour walking around campus finding as many different living things as they could, and write down what they saw. At the same time, I was walking around with my camera talking pictures of all the critters I saw. The result was over 150 pictures in less than an hour (some were duplicates of the same organism). I then prepared a slide show of all the different things I saw and posted it for the students. They were to organize the slides into groups based on how they thought things fit together. Bottom line: I took a picture of some unique critter every 30 seconds as I walked around our campus - pretty much a suburban, highly altered environment. And there were lots of organisms I didn't photograph.

Where does all that diversity come from?

Beyond a reasonable doubt ...

One of my former colleagues just emailed an abstract of a recently-published article about the evidence supporting common descent of proteins with similar functions in different species. The article is entitled "Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Evolution from DNA Sequences" and the authors clearly believe that they've put the final nail in the Creationism coffin, or at least provided conclusive evidence in support of evolution that no reasonable person could deny. I posted a link to the article on a message board where "evolutionists" and "creationists" keep banging heads, generating more heat than light; the response from "evolutionists" was "I won't hold my breath" (in terms of convincing creationists that evolution is as true as anything in science). So far, no response from creationists.

Well, I won't hold my breath either. But I am curious - if you're a creationist, what evidence would convince you that evolution was true? Is there any evidence that would do that for you - or is you belief based on something other than evidence? I ask because scientists keep piling on more and more evidence supporting evolution, but that evidence has absolutely no effect on the general public. If it's important for people to recognize the truth of evolution (and I think it is), what can scientists do to change the game?

Back to school

It's the start of another academic year - one of many such starts for an old fart like me. I still get excited by this, though, so I guess that's a sign that I chose the right career. I'm teaching a course on insects, the first since I left graduate school and the University of Illinois many years ago. Technology got in the way, but that was a good prompt to go outside and actually look at real insects rather than images on a projection screen. Not to say that such images can't be useful - after all, I'm unlikely to find a Ricinulei around Eureka! Insects have been (and continue to be) vital to the advancement of our biological understanding. Our friend, Charles Darwin (an inveterate beetle collector), noted that social insects posed a real problem for natural selection - how can castes evolve and be maintained when most castes can't reproduce. Charlie figured it out that - kin selection, first mentioned in On the Origin of Species ... in 1859. Look it up! Gotta run - I'll try and post more.