The Fog of War

I just watched the movie The Fog of War which is essentially an illustrated two-hour interview with Robert Strange McNamara. What an amazing film--McNamara was to Babyboomers as Rumsfeld is to Generations X, Y, and possibly Z. The man was responsible for possibly hundreds of thousands of deaths, civilian and military, and some of the most gruesome parts of twentieth century history--none of which the movie shies away from. However, this man, who has accomplished much evil, is some sort of Zen master in the end. He is the reverse of Darth Vader, and probably the more real version, if we can cast him in that role and LBJ as the non-dualist Palpatine. I mean, there were plenty of kids ready to chant, "Hey, Hey, LBJ how many kids did you kill today." It was also interesting how McNamara himself set up this moral comparison between him and Curtis LeMay. It was almost as if he felt that the two of them were flip sides of the same coin.


Anyways, the Vietnam war--like the quasi-genocide perpetrated against the pre-European American population and African slavery--is one of the darkest chapters in American history. I go back and forth weekly on whether that war was worth fighting--thanks a lot, Michael Lind. However, the fact of the matter is that at the end of the day over 3 million Vietnamese were dead and we had dropped more bombs on that small country than we did on all of Europe during WWII.
However, despite all of this, McNamara comes off as a kind of Zen master, whose life lessons the moviemaker, Errol Morris, distills into the following...

1. Empathize with your enemy.


2. Rationality will not save us.


3. There’s something beyond one’s self.


4. Maximize efficiency.


5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war.


6. Get the data.


7. Belief and seeing are both often wrong.


8. Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.


9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.


10. Never say never.


11. You can’t change human nature.

I would recommend anyone who is not a dualist to approach this movie as a profound moral teacher. Listen to this beauty...

"We are the most powerful nation in the world--economically, politically and militarily--and we are likely to remain so for decades ahead. But we are not omniscient. If we cannot persuade other nations with similar interests and values of the merits of our proposed use of that power, we should not proceed unilaterally..."

It is a shame that each generation has to learn for itself the disappointment and horror of armed combat. Despite Rumsfeld's brief foray into epistemology, I wonder if he will produce such a thoughtful reflection on the nature of war. Maybe they were the "Greatest Generation" after all.