The Fog of War...

I watched a great documentary last night. It was called The Fog of War. Essentially, it was a 2+ hour interview with Robert McNamara who was Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson during the Cuban Missile Crisis, The Vietnam War, and Bay of Pigs. Talk about an engrossing movie. I just sat there and watched and listened to him talk. This man I don’t think sleeps very well at night. He has a lot on his mind from his days in office and subsequently at the World Bank which he ran for 15 years or so after his Secretary of Defense days. He brings up a lot of insightful information, things he’s said that he’s had the hindsight now to look back upon, and to judge what happened during his times in WWII and forward. You see him move from telling Kennedy that there should be an announcement saying that troops are going to be pulled out from Vietnam in a very short time period, then Kennedy getting killed, and Johnson taking over and calling for more troops and more war in Vietnam, and his subsequent support for his new President in the war effort in Vietnam. He said that years later, he was meeting with Vietnamese officials, and they brought it to his attention that they were fighting for their independence, and that they would have fought until the last to gain that. He didn’t understand that then, but understands it now. This movie provokes a lot of thought, especially considering that it was filmed before we the United States invaded Iraq, and how closely things parallel each other from Vietnam to Iraq. People say that they’re not even close, not in the terms of body count, but in terms of how the administration now is speaking about Iraq and how the Johnson administration spoke about Vietnam, it’s eerily familiar, and there are a lot of turns of phrase that sound almost exactly the same. Hell, driving to work this morning I heard George W. Bush proclaiming how well the war in Iraq is going. I think back to last night, when I heard McNamara saying the same thing about Vietnam over and over again, until all of a sudden, it really wasn’t true, which it wasn’t true in the first place. I think the same could be said for Iraq. Yes? No? I think yes. Everyday, we hear about insurgents killing off civilians, our soldiers, and the number of attacks seems to be ever increasing over the last few months. How well could things be going if people are still dying, the country is in shambles, and the people there and around the world in general feel less safe now than they did 2 years ago? Can’t be going too well I don’t think. Here is the link for the movie itself:

www.sonyclassics.com/fogofwar/

I think that it is super thought provoking. One thing that he says during the movie that rings true is something about America being the pre-eminent world power, and that we shouldn’t take this power lightly. He says, and I’m paraphrasing here, that America shouldn’t act unilaterally against another country unless countries that are our allies and who share common cultures and moral values as us aren’t on board with us in acting unilaterally. This rings true especially with Iraq, when most of our closest allies wanted nothing to do with the invasion and subsequent occupation of that country. I we can’t get our closest allies and friends behind us, we shouldn’t do it. But, we did anyway.

So, watch this movie, think about it. See where we’ve been, and where we’re going, they seem like similar paths. It’s not a good thing at all.