Blog 12: DW

Morris' film, Fog of War, is a documentary about the life of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. McNamara talks about his life and the big American events he was involved in like World War II, being an executive at Ford Motor Company, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War. This film is centered around 11 key points that McNamara has uncovered throughout his experiences. They 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

McNamara uses these rules to sort of try and justify his actions throughout his life. He brings up many reasons that he did the things that he did, like he was just following orders or the cold war. Lessons 1, 4, 5, and 6 are about the keys and necessities of war. Each are important in their own ways to the success of a war. In addition to these lessons, he includes more philosophical lessons. He was involved in a lot of philosophy courses in school and thus incorporates lessons 2, 3, and 7 in. These lessons are more focused on indentifying characteristics of how people work and react to certain things that could negatively affect the outcome of the war and trying to correct those things before they do so. The final 4 lessons focus seem to be more based most on opinion than anything else. He uses these to illustrate the way war has a way to be misunderstood easily and incomprehensible by most. Things happen in war that nobody expected could happen and that people see as inexcusable. He seems to go against lesson 9 when talking about Vietnam because nothing good came of the Vietnam War and so much evil was committed.

I found this film largely to be an apology for some of his actions that were not the smartest or "right" he could have made. He is making an attempt to explain what caused him to make the decisions that he did, but realized that there are so many things that go into making serious decisions like that that nobody can truly or fully understand. He brings up the point that he and other officials probably would have been tried as war criminals if they had not won the war because of the things they ordered be done. One example is of the firebombing campaigns in Japan. He tries to bring the devastation into perspective by comparing what was destroyed in Japan to the equivalent of cities in the US like New York, Chicago, and Las Angeles. In retrospect, some decisions look like the wrong ones, but at the time he thought he was doing what was in the best interest of the country.