The Fog of War

Jenny and I saw this Oscar-winning documentary this past weekend; it's essentially a long interview with its subject, Robert McNamara. Talk about a well-made film, I can understand why it won the Oscar instead of higher-profile films like Michael Moore's more entertaining but less coherent Fahrenheit 911. The archive footage that was chosen really hit the mark, but McNamara himself is a very able performer. I sure hope I'm that coherent when I'm 85 years old. He's extremely blunt and in-your-face, but just below the surface there's a lot of regret? Frustration? Defiance? All of the above, perhaps. He doesn't take full responsibility for anything (his roles in the firebombing of Japan in WWII and as Secretary of Defense for most of Vietnam are well-documented), but at the same time admits that he was at the center of this huge military decision-making apparatus that went horribly wrong when mixed with Cold War politics.

McNamara is a paradoxical figure. He was a master of efficiency and optimizing who helped develop the bombing technique that destroyed most of Japan long before the Bombs were dropped, but acknowledges in the film that if the U.S. had been on the losing side of WWII he would certainly have been convicted of war crimes. He was the public face of one of the most controversial military operations in U.S. history, but behind the scenes was working to extricate us from that mess long before the troops came home. At the end of the film though, he remains guarded, unwilling to directly address the emotional toll that's been taken, or any feelings of guilt or remorse (I'm assuming those feeling do exist, btw). He doesn't want to visit those places publicly, because he doesn't think that anything good will come of it. Likewise, as well made as this documentary is, it's unlikely that anything good will come of it anytime soon - the 'leadership' of the U.S. seems to be making the same mistakes in the Middle East that were made in Vietnam.

The footage of Lyndon Johnson was most striking - the president with the thick Texas accent, speeches filled with rhetoric about stopping tyranny and preserving freedom. Sound familiar? Too bad that our current president was busy getting drunk and doing lots of drugs while Vietnam was happening, otherwise he might have actually learned something! One of the most memorable scenes in the film was of McNamara meeting with the former North Vietnamese foreign minister in 1992. He told McNamara that the North Vietnamese leadership considered the conflict in their country as simply a civil war, and the U.S. as a colonial power looking to take the place of former occupant France. They never saw it as part of the Cold War, and were not concerned about Chinese influence. Big surprise, a U.S. war for no good reason! Hey that reminds me, have we found those weapons in Iraq yet?

That scene did remind me of something though - Brian Schweitzer, the current governor of Montana (of all places), a Democrat who spent time as a businessman in the Middle East and can speak Arabic, said this in a Salon Interview last month when asked about Iraq:

I had misgivings from the very beginning. We were told that this incursion was going to make the world a safer place. But that didn't square with me because I knew, in the Middle East, the days of the Crusades are like they happened just a few years ago. Any incursion of the West into Islamic cultures is going to be met with resistance.

Anyway, I could write four more pages on this film, but I've probably already lost some people. Check out the movie yourself, especially if you plan on supporting a war anytime soon - McNamara's eleven lessons (they serve as a loose framework for the film) may give you pause.