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Hudson River School, Class of always and forever.

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Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson's icy-veined, cold-visaged and rigidly intellectual point man for a war that sent thousands upon thousands of people (most of them young) to their utterly pointless deaths, has died at the ripe old age of 93.

Long after the horror of Vietnam was over, McNamara would concede, in remarks that were like salt in the still festering wounds of the loved ones of those who had died, that he had been "wrong, terribly wrong" about the war. I felt nothing but utter contempt for his concession.

I remember getting my draft notice in the mid-1960s as Johnson's military buildup for the war was in full swing. I'm not sure what I expected. Probably that the other recruits would be a tough bunch, that they would all look like John Wayne. I was staggered on the first day of basic training at Fort Dix, N.J., to be part of a motley gathering of mostly scared and skinny kids who looked like the guys I'd gone to high school with. Who looked, basically, pun intended, like me.

That's who was shipped off to Vietnam in droves — youngsters 18, 19, 20 and 21. Many, of course, would die there, and many others would come back forever scarred.

For what?

More than 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam and some 2 million to 3 million Vietnamese. More than 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq, and no one knows how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Even as I was writing this, reports were coming in of seven more American G.I.'s killed in Afghanistan — a war that made sense in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, but makes very little sense now.

None of these wars had clearly articulated goals or endgames. None were pursued with the kind of intensity and sense of common purpose and shared sacrifice that marked World War II. Wars are now mostly background noise, distant events overshadowed by celebrity deaths and the antics of Sarah Palin, Mark Sanford and the like.

The obscenity of war is lost on most Americans, and that drains the death of Robert McNamara of any real significance.

—Bob Herbert, After the War Was Over, The New York Times, July 6, 2009.

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The timing of his passing saw McNamara join a motley crew of notables and celebrities who have shuffled loose the mortal coil in the last two weeks. Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Billy Mays, Steve McNair; each of these luminaries got a share of media coverage - some more than others, of course - and McNamara was no different. Every major newspaper in America treated the death of McNamara as front-page news, and the only reason his passing was not part of the rotation on the cable networks on Tuesday was because they were very slowly burying Michael Jackson in Los Angeles.

Some other people also died in the last two weeks. Two International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) soldiers were killed in Afghanistan on July 1. Three members of a family were killed by rocket fire on the same day. Two British soldiers and one American soldier were killed in Afghanistan on July 2. Another American soldier was captured. A Canadian soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan on July 3. Two American soldiers were killed on the Fourth of July. A US Marine and three UK troops were killed in Afghanistan on July 5. Seven US troops were killed in Afghanistan on July 6. In the last two days, five Iraqi policemen and two Iraqi soldiers were killed in Baghdad. Five more policemen were killed in Mosul. Thirty-eight Coalition troops were killed in June in Afghanistan, and 19 have been killed in the first week of July. In Afghanistan, 1,220 Coalition troops have died since 2001. Fifteen US troops were killed in June in Iraq, and 4,321 have died since 2003.

None of these people got the same kind of ink as McMahon, Fawcett, Jackson, Mays, McNair or McNamara, but they are just as dead. The passing of McNamara and the deaths of all those soldiers belong in the same column, because they are all part of the same long, sad, blood-soaked story.

Vietnam was an exercise in hubris, deception and profiteering that McNamara spent the latter half of his life trying to justify, live down and explain away. The soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan would recognize Robert McNamara, for they were consigned to the grave by McNamara's modern replacements. Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rove, Libby and the other Bush administration officials who ginned up two wars and made abject debacles of both are the modern inheritors of McNamara's curse. As are the soldiers and civilians who have been chewed up and annihilated. As are we all.

Robert McNamara taught us all we needed to know about the folly of war, about aftermath and about regret. Nobody listened, nobody learned, except for the dead.

—William Rivers Pitt, "McNamara's Ghost," Truthout, July 7, 2009.

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Diabetes. Parkinson's disease. Multiple sclerosis. ALS or Lou Gehrig's Disease.

Approximately 5.3 million Americans suffer from some form of brain injury. Cancer is responsible for 25 percent of all deaths in America. Half of all men and one-third of all women in America will develop cancer during their lifetimes. More than half a million Americans suffer from blindness. Hundreds of millions of people in every nation on Earth suffer from all these conditions.

Stem cell research has great potential to treat, or even cure, many of these maladies, and many more besides. The story behind why America has not pursued stem cell research with the level of vigor the possibilities would seem to demand is long and politically convoluted, but basically boils down to this: a small but vocal minority in the country believe stem cell research is baby butchery akin to legalized abortion, and for the last eight years a president who agreed, or simply didn't want to tick that small minority off, was in office. A lot of other politicians who should have known better heard words like "snowflake babies" and "abortion" and ran like rabbits, and thus America's pursuit of this astonishing medical breakthrough has been stuck in the mud.

Not for much longer.

Millions of Americans and hundreds of millions more worldwide who have been afflicted by these terrible maladies can actually begin to imagine what once seemed impossible: getting well. They can dream of the incurable becoming cured. They can hope.

Welcome, at last, to the 21st century.

—William Rivers Pitt, "Getting Well," truthout, February 17, 2009

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From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and the entire apparatus of printing. To condense from one's memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another."

—John Updike, March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009

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After more than seven years of Mr. Bush's using fear and xenophobia to justify a disastrous and unnecessary war and undermine the most fundamental American rights, it was exhilarating to hear Mr. Obama reject "as false the choice between our safety and our ideals."

Instead of Mr. Bush's unilateralism, Mr. Obama said the United States is "ready to lead once more," by making itself a "friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity." He said "our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please." Mr. Obama told the Muslim world that he wants "a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect."

Mr. Obama was steely toward those "who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents." He warned them that "our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you." But where Mr. Bush painted this as an epochal, almost biblical battle between America and those who hate us and "who hate freedom," Mr. Obama also offered to "extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist."

—The New York Times, January 20, 2009, on the occasion of the inaugural address of Barack Hussein Obama, 44th President of the United States of America.

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While President-elect Obama has the possibility of re-engaging with a world repulsed by the destructive polices of the Bush Administration, it is likely that escalating the war in Afghanistan will endanger that possibility. Escalation may cause a rift with European allies whose people have turned against this war, and our ability to extricate ourselves from the quagmire will only get harder. Consider the warning of former national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski: "We are running the risk of repeating the mistake the Soviet Union made.... Our strategy is getting in deeper and deeper." Russian military officers caution that Afghans cannot be conquered, as the Soviets attempted to do in the 1980s with nearly twice as many troops as NATO and the US currently have in the country and with three times the number of Afghan troops that Karzai can deploy.

The best prospect for more concerted action against Al-Qaeda is a planned withdrawal of US forces, and for reconstruction to be taken over by a multinational coalition that has as few American fingerprints as possible. The fact that this is an American project is the principal reason why Pakistani groups support the Islamic insurgents. To be fair, President-elect Obama has spoken on the importance (of) development aid and resolving the opium trade; but military escalation remains the centerpiece of his plan. The point of withdrawal is not to abandon Afghanistan, but to take a different approach to targeted aid, smart diplomacy, and intelligence cooperation. A regional solution will be tough--one that involves Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, China, Russia, and Iran (who opposes the Taliban and also has its own fight with Afghan drug warlords on its border), as will a negotiated settlement between the Karzai government and the Taliban. But these should be the priorities of the Obama Administration, rather than sending more young men and women to die in the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan and making this President Obama's War.

—Katrina Vanden Heuvel, "Obama Must Get Afghanistan Right," The Nation, January 8, 2009