Fog of War 2003
I remember this documentary getting very positive reviews when it came out. I heard Robert McNamara in a debate when I was in college in 1986 or so and being very impressed. Brent Scowcroft who would later become Secretary of Defense under George Bush was pitted against him and was simply blown away by McNamara’s ability to remember facts and present a point. So I was looking forward to hearing McNamara again.
Unfortunately, Fog of War is a very apt title for this movie, because anything McNamara is saying is lost in some kind of fog of pointlessness. The movie presents McNamara’s eleven guidelines which are as follows:
- Empathize with your enemy
- Rationality will not save us
- There’s something beyond one’s self
- Maximize efficiency
- Proportionality should be a guideline for war
- Get the data
- Belief and seeing are both often wrong
- Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning
- In order to do good you may have to engage in evil
- Never say never
- You can’t change human nature
There are a few good points there. The first point is presented in the context of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the former ambassador to Russia points out Krushchev’s position and says he is just looking for a way out of the situation and the US only has to give him a way out and he will take it. Okay, so that’s pretty good. The second says that rational men brought us to the brink of nuclear war when it would have meant complete destruction. That seems to wipe out the first. I have no idea what some of the other things mean. “Never say never"? That’s great advice? In fact, the DVD has an extra where McNamara presents his own 10 points and says he didn’t make up the ones that were in the movie. His 10 points all make a lot more sense. And that’s the problem with the movie: McNamara is lost in the fog. Yes, the whole movie is essentially McNamara talking, but there isn’t a focus or context. I was too young to remember McNamara as Secretary of Defense, forced out by LBJ when they disagreed over the conduct of Vietnam. There are a few sketchy parallels with the Iraq war today, for instance McNamara is given the Medal of Freedom by LBJ, just as George “Slam Dunk” Tenent was given one by Bush for leading us into a war on false pretenses. McNamara looks a lot like Donald Rumsfeld and uses the same technique of answering the question you wanted the reporter to ask rather than the one he did ask. McNamara says that as a global leader we must refrain from acting unilaterally unless it is to directly defend our country. He says in Vietnam we had no allies, even among countries that shared our values and interests. In Iraq, we acted unilaterally again without significant allies.
But really that’s about it. We hear from McNamara about working at Ford, but it comes as a surprise that all of the sudden he is the president of Ford. One minute he is compiling auto safety statistics and the next he is president. What did he do to rise so quickly?
There is also some decent discussion on when McNamara worked for Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who supervised the air war against mainland Japan with such great disregard for civilian casualties that he would have been tried and executed at Nuremburg if the US hadn’t won. That desire for victory and defense with disregard for morality brought us to the brink during the Cuban Missile Crisis and got us further involved in Vietnam when Kennedy was on the brink of withdrawing US advisors.
So there are a few points, but they are scattershot and poorly supported or even expanded. As such, I thought this movie failed to really present much of anything other than a foggy sketch of a former Secretary of Defense. I am giving it a C+.
Written: 21 Jun 2006