The Fog of War, directed by Errol Morris, is subtitled Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. The documentary raises important questions, provides information that will be new to many filmviewers, and the answers are extremely troubling. Propaganda documentaries present a single side of an issue and thus often fail to persuade. Former Defense Secretary McNamara's narrative, because enveloped in ambiguity, candor, revelations, and self-doubt, is profound. The words of the eleven lessons, which appear as titles on the screen, are simple, so they have to be unpacked to be understood. But the unpacking is hardly simplistic. After all, McNamara was on the faculty of Harvard's Graduate School of Business Administration, and he might have continued to be an academic if he had not been lured first into the private sector and later by an offer from John Kennedy, as president-elect of the United States, only a month after being promoted from Vice President to CEO at Ford Motor Company. For the sake of a film summary, the lessons are as follows: (1) Empathize with your enemy. Here he indicates that the Cuban Missiles Crisis ended peacefully because experts understood Nikita Khrushchev well, but later he notes that nobody in Washington realized that Ho Chi Minh's nationalist agenda had nothing to do with the Cold War. (2) Rationality will not save us. Here he reflects that on three occasions the United States was close to launching nuclear attacks while he was Secretary of Defense, but human values stopped the madness. (3) There's something beyond oneself. Here he reflects that decisionmakers must think outside the box, and his examples of narrowmindedness are shocking. (4) Maximize efficiency. He compliments Air Force General Curtis LeMay for using the B-27 to firebomb Japanese cities at 5,000 feet; although the airplane was designed to drop bombs from an altitude beyond the range of antiaircraft, the target was being missed, and LeMay was then the only commander interested in target efficiency. (5) Proportionality should be a guideline in war. McNamara suggests that LeMay's strategy made the use of two nuclear bombs on Japanese cities completely unnecessary. (6) Get the data. He takes credit for the introduction of automobile seatbelts to save lives because he demanded a study on the causes of car accidents and then tried to extend the same principle to his decisionmaking in Washington. (7) Belief and seeing are often both wrong. Here he indicates that North Vietnam did briefly shell an American naval vessel in the international waters of the Gulf of Tonkin, but the report about torpedoes was wrong, so the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was premised on incorrect information. (8) Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. In a statement that obviously refers to George W. Bush, McNamara notes that neither Britain, France, nor Japan supported American entry into Vietnam; when countries that share American values do not support a major policy, that policy should be rethought. (9) In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil. Yet McNamara also appears to deny that the ends ever justify the means, so he leaves his lesson as a paradox. (10) Never say never. Here McNamara is obscure in explaining what he means, as he confesses that he was relieved of his duties as Secretary of Defense shortly after writing a memo to President Lyndon Johnson that advocated a pullout from Vietnam. (11) You can't change human nature. Here he admits that he made mistakes throughout his life, and many while Secretary of Defense. In his summary statement, perhaps his twelfth lesson, he explains the phrase "fog of war," saying that war involves unnecessary killing because the enterprise is complex, with too many variables. Much of McNamara's career as Secretary of Defense is not mentioned in the documentary, notably his role in reorganizing the department in a cost-effective manner and his changing views of nuclear weapons strategy. The documentary appears to be a followup of his books In Retrospect : The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1996) and Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy (1999). Titles at the end indicate that he served as President of the World Bank from 1968-1981 and that he continues to speak his mind. However, there is no documentary as yet about his tenure at the World Bank, a subject recently analyzed in John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004), a epiphanic book by an insider who clearly indicates that World Bank funding served the objective of providing windfall contracts for American corporations to build projects that not only would enrich elites in poor countries but also would dispossess the poor of their livelihoods and run up unpayable Third World debt, thereby giving Washington leverage to blackmail favorable votes in the United Nations and motivation to assassinate leaders who would not tow the line as Washington constructed the world's first global economic empire. MH
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