The Fog of War ***

11 Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara

Director: Errol Morris
Year: 2003

A very interesting interview with Bob McNamara is the centerpiece for this documentary. The lessons learned are indeed insightful, and one only wishes that in 2003 President Bush had watched this film and applied the lessons learned by McNamara.

The lessons are:
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 re-examine 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

The film spends its time filling in bits and pieces of the life of McNamara and showing us just how influential he has been on American life, from being one of the first advocates for seatbelts in cars, to guiding Kennedy through the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even hand-picking Kennedy's final resting place.

The interview is most intriguing when McNamara unveils his mistakes and especially when he unveils his greatest, and America's most poignant mistake, the Vietnam War. He tells of his revelation that it was an enormous misunderstanding... that had we understood the Vietnamese civil war as just that, rather than interpreting as a front in the feared war between communism and democracy, we could have kept our noses out of their business and saved a whole lot of lives and resources.

The film is least interesting when delving into his personal life, I understand that he's a human and must have a family and must have come from somewhere, but I am so much more intrigued by what he says about American activities and decision making during wartime, and especially General Curtis LeMay, as an example of the brutal "warmonger" stereotype, painting him much more complicatedly, part reasonable, and part truly brutal, possibly war-criminal. In fact, the film should be most shocking when McNamara admits that had we lost WWII he himself should have been tried as a war-criminal.

A must see for any person of power, I wish every military person would see and understand these lessons before learning the lessons of Tsun Tsu's "The Art of War".

Oh, and one last note, Errol Morris really exceeds in this film with his selection of and editing of archive footage.