Blog 12 AZ

The Fog Of War depicts the life of Robert McNamara, United States Secretary of Defense 1961 to 1968. The topics discussed spans McNamara's life work which encompasses his involvment in WWII, being an executive at Ford Motor Company, and his involvment in the Vietnam War under President John F Kenedy and Lyndon B Johnson. The film is based around eleven lesson which McNamara discusses.

The eleven rules 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 reexamine 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.

In the film, it appeared that McNamara attempted to make peace with all of his actions and explain them to the American Public. He explained that these rules were about war, not a specific war. When asked about relating them to the Iraq war he declined to answer. Overall it seemed like he placed the most emphasis on trying to justify his actions in Vietnam. A few times he stated some excuses that: the country was in the middle of the cold war, he was only following the President's orders, and everything was kind of like a domino effect in that he had no real power to change or alter the situation at the time.

The ideas behind the rules shifted a few times. Some of the rules were more of a philosophicla message. For example rule 2 "Rationality will not save us" and 7. " Belief and seeing are both often wrong". Other rules were more obvious and concrete. For example rule 4, 5, and 6. In this section McNamara compared cities destroyed in the war to the equivalent of what a US sized city would be. The point of doing this was to relate the proportionality of what was destroyed to the objectives for destroying it. This point is controversial because some feel that destroying these cities was just while others disagree. McNamara seems to dance around the subject and he doesn't really say what his stance was. Also in this section McNamara explains how the US had failed to come to state with the rules of the war. He stresses the point again about how the President thought it was in the country's best interest to reveal as little information as possible. He also pointed out that even the President and people in high governmental positions had no idea what was really going on. He further expresses this when he is speaking of himself and how he was elected to be the country's secretary of defense, when he had very little experience and knowlege of war and war strategies.

The last three rules were more opinion based. In lesson 9 "In order to do good you have to engage in evil", McNamara gave the impression that we did not do anything good in Vietnam. Therefore he is implying that this rule does not really apply in this situation of war. He did not speak of one positive thing that came out of the evil that we started in Vietnam.
In the two rules "Never say never" and "You can't change human nature" he trys to justify everything by explaining how complex war is. He talkes of the "fog of war" and how no one can comprehend it. He states that we are all rational people, but reason has its limits and when we are in a war situation there is always a lot of misunderstanding. The saying "damned if you do, and damned if you don't" is applied to the war and used to make decisions in the past seem less bad.