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| Notes on the Fog of War |
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26 February 04. The first piece of excitement was of course the Philip Glass soundtrack. That Glass, he's come a long way since the seventies. Check out his concerto for violin and orchestra, for example. The visuals were a mix of Koyaanisqatsi-type multiple-speed stuff and standard modern documentary visuals (like X-treme angles of a reel-to-reel tape player during the recorded conversations, and endless footage of bombs falling). When somebody says, `those commies will cheat on our testing bans by testing on the other side of the moon!' the screen showed stock footage of the moon. Despite being in a conference room, we still had popcorn and soda, and the woman behind me still talked through the whole frigging movie. E.g., when the interviewer asks Robert McNamara if he felt guilty about his involvement in the Vietnam war, the woman behind me answered for him, `Yes!' All I could think was, hel-lo Miss Loudmouth, he's five f.ing chairs down from you. Robert sat in the back, which was unfortunate, because there were many, many times when I wanted to turn from the Robert McNamara on the screen to see the reaction of the Robert McNamara sitting three rows behind me, but that would be gauche. My impression is that he's been sort of touring with the darn film (e.g., he says he's been asked to present it to the International Criminal Court at the Hague), so he's probably over the part where he'd actually show much reaction to the film. Sometimes I imagine the afterlife to consist of just watching your life over and over again on an endless loop, rejoicing or regretting every detail millions of times over. Now, this Vietnam thing happened before I was born (in English usage, `Vietnam' refers to a war, not a country). I am told by many people who have actually read about distant history, that Mr. McNamara was the arse behind the war, and hundreds of thousands of deaths are his fault. The film of course shows it from his perspective. Initially, he had insisted on granting the director (Errol Morris) an interview exactly 150% of length of the movie, allowing Errol to edit, but not to hand-pick some tiny percentage of things that Errol liked. In the end, they filmed 23 hours of interview. [That included lots of stuff about the World Bank which didn't make it to the movie at all, but which you'll find on the DVD when that comes out---the interviewee's cut.] In the film, McNamara is a pragmatic dove, who offers eleven lessons about maintaining peace (see below). There are two scapegoats in the movie: General Curtis LeMay and President Johnson. LeMay is shown throughout the movie chomping a cigar, and Robert tells us that his sole interest in war was to maximize the ratio of damage inflicted upon the enemy to his men killed. McNamara's role at the time, from his institute at Harvard (roll footage of IBM Hollerith machines sorting punch cards) was to work out the maximally efficient use of military equipment. Somewhere between Robert's recommendations (whatever they were) and Curtis's implementation, a hundred thousand people in Tokyo were killed. Our causality tests (from a few days ago) would say McNamara caused these deaths, but it's again not a 100% direct line from there to saying that McNamara was responsible for the deaths. [Note to Mr. DCH of New Brunswick, NJ: this imperfect connection between causality and responsibility also means that we can place ex-post responsibility on a person for an action he or she did not formally cause. Keeping the two concepts separate clears a lot of stuff up.] Then there was the part where he presided over Vietnam as Secretary of Defense. He is again characterized as a pragmatic guy, who wanted to pull troops out over and over again while Johnson kept wanting to put more troops in, and who argued with Johnson until Johnson sacked him. We're given the impression that Robert minimized the damage as best he could, and under another hypothetical Secretary of Defense, there would only have been more killing. I don't know. At the end, we find out that Vietnam was all one big misunderstanding: the U.S.A. was fighting to keep the commies out, and the Vietnamese were fighting to keep from being colonized by the U.S.A. Oh, it's all straight out of Three's Company. The structure of the film was `here are things Robert learned over the course of his life', but it turns out that the eleven lessons which the film are built around are not the eleven lessons that Mr. McNamara gave to the director. Here are a few of the lessons from Robert's pen, which are much more concrete and much less platitudish than those the director put on the screen: 1. The human race will not eliminate war in this century, but we can reduce the brutality of war--the level of killing--by adhering to the principles of a ``just war,'' in particular the principle of ``proportionality.'' 3. 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 except in the unlikely requirement to defend the continental U.S., Alaska and Hawaii. 6. Corporate executives must recognize there is no contradiction between a soft heart and a hard head. Of course, they have responsibilities to stockholders; but they also have responsibilities to their employees, their customers, and the society as a whole. 7. President Kennedy believed a primary responsibility of a president--indeed, I would say the primary responsibility of a president--is to keep the nation out of a war if at all possible. 8. War is a blunt instrument by which to settle disputes between or within nations. And economic sanctions are rarely effective. We should build a system of jurisprudence--based on the International Criminal Court that the U.S. has refused to support--which would hold individuals responsible for crimes against humanity and thereby, add to our weapons of deterrence. 9. If we deal effectively with terrorists across the globe, we should develop a sense of empathy--I don't mean ``sympathy,'' by rather understanding--to counter their attacks on us and the Western World. My summary of the overall gist of the film is, `we're all rational, but entirely fallible, and if we fuck up during a war, then lots of people die. This implies that we should be avoiding war wherever possible.' Thus, (name of institution) was really the absolute perfect place for this movie, since many of the foreign policy people are sort of well-educated belligerents. Many people pressed him about his opinion about Iraq, and he explicitly refused to comment, saying it'd be inappropriate for the ex-Secretary of Defense to comment when the current Secretary is embroiled in a situation right now. ``...draw your own conclusions from the film'', he suggested, which doesn't seem particularly difficult. And there's number seven in the above list, which is as pointed a comment as you could make. Does he empathise with Donald Rumsfeld? ``The answer is yes, but I don't want to say anything else.'' My overall impression, beyond his desperate efforts to not offer up any sound bites, is that the administration has wholeheartedly failed to learn from the past, including the mistakes the Robert himself had made. The only thing worse than living a tragic episode of Three's Company would be living a re-run of a tragic episode of Three's Company. [By the way, are you picking up my distinction between `blah', a word I felt needed some sort of separation from other language, and ``quote'', a statement made by another human being which I tried my hardest to state verbatim.] His interest in the ICC was kind of interesting and not what one would had expected, but it made sense in the context of all else. At the moment, he points out, there are only two ways to influence a country: economic sanctions and military threats/actions. ``One's ineffective and one's crude'', so we need an established international law that will allow sanctions against a country for specific actions. To some extent, it feels like an apology of the form, `If I'd had a document that said Agent Orange was illegal, I certainly wouldn't have used it---so it's not that I'm an arse, it's that we need better laws.' But then, the law is a codification of things the way we wish they would be, so in that respect the call for support of the ICC is a perfect conclusion for the movie.
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