Rented it over the weekend. Fasicinating movie, and frightening. McNamara mentions 11 lessons: Lesson #1: Empathize with your enemy. Lesson #2: Rationality will not save us. Lesson #3: There’s something beyond one’s self. Lesson #4: Maximize efficiency. Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Lesson #6: Get the data. Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong. Lesson #8: Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. Lesson #9: In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil. Lesson #10: Never say never. Lesson #11: You can’t change human nature. Much of the details can be found here (the lesson plan link is espcially informative and thought provoking): http://www.sonyclassics.com/fogofwar/indexFlash.html I recommend renting this movie. Consider the lessons in the context of the current situation in Iraq. It's more than a little scary how many of the lessons are completely violated by Bush and his Administration (except perhaps #9). A piece of the transcript (a conversation between Johnson and McNamara): "Johnson: I hate to modify your speech any because it's been a good one, but I just wonder if we should find two minutes in there for Vietnam? McNamara: Yeah, the problem is what to say about it. Johnson: I'll tell you what I would say about it. I would say that we have a commitment to Vietnamese freedom. We could pull out of there, the dominoes would fall, and that part of the world would go to the Communists. We could send our marines in there, and we could get tied down in a Third World War or another Korean action. Nobody really understands what it is out there. They're asking questions and saying why don't we do more. Well, I think this: you can have more war or you can have more appeasement. But we don't want more of either. Our purpose is to train these people [the South Vietnamese] and our training's going good." Sound a little familiar?
And after lying to sell a war of convenience resulting in tens of thousands of dead and wounded Americans, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Viet Namese, the Wonder Boy became president of the world bank instead of dying in prison as SHOULD have been his fate.
Yeah, I have to be honest in that a part of me feels that McNamara's "confessions", while valuable and often true, are also a way for him to make peace near the end of his life. They are self-serving, perhaps in the very same way that the Viet Nam years were for him and the rest of the Administration. There's a really odd moment in the film where he talks about those years: "...You know, it was a traumatic period. My wife probably got ulcers from it, she may have even ultimately died from the stress. My son got ulcers. It was very traumatic, but they were some of the best years of our life and all members of my family benefited from it. It was terrific." Very strange that he is saying those years essentially cost him his family, but that they were great years. He makes no mention of the cost to families involved in the war - a war he admits, more or less, was a mistake. He's an odd man, and the movie doesn't (and shouldn't) let him off the hook for his decisions.
Having a personal interest, I bought that DVD. IMO, McNamara is a Wilsonian-New Deal Democrat who hasn't learned much at all. A very bright man (not much evident in the video) but probably not a very sensible one. He's still seeing JFK through a gilded fog.
