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Title: The Fog of War
Genre: Documentary
Director: Errol Morris
Cast: Robert S. McNamara
Runtime: 107 min

This documentary by Errol Morris is a running interview with controversial former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara who served under Kennedy and Johnson. McNamara is unobtrusively filmed expressing his views on events in hindsight namely the Cuban missile crisis, WWII, and the Vietnam War. The interviews are interspaced with disturbing archival footage from these events. Fog of War is on one level an anecdotal recollection of McNamara's life: from his earliest memories of the elated celebrations at the end of WWI, fondly recalling his precocious youth in grade school topping his class, to his meteoric rise to the helm of Ford Motor Company for five weeks until his almost impromptu induction into the administration at the behest of JFK. 85-year-old McNamara is candid in front of the camera, his eyes reddening as he recalls painful experiences. The clarity of his memory belying his age and his intelligence and the collages of infamous historical episodes make for riveting viewing.

Fog of War succinctly summarises the eleven lessons McNamara draws upon.

1. Empathize with your enemy.
This is in relation to the Cuban missile crisis, in which McNamara does not revel in the triumphalism of having had a part in averting a world nuclear crisis, but proclaims that luck was on America's side as they stared down the barrel of nuclear war. He is full of praise for the rationality of the former ambassador at Moscow who advised a remedy without the application of force, in which Khrushchev could withdraw and save face by claiming he had saved Castro's Cuba from destruction by the US. Luck and empathy for the pressures faced by Khrushchev at the Politburo prevented the onset of total war.

2. Rationality will not save us.
McNamara questions the relevance of rationality when the possibility of total destruction via nuclear warheads is in the hands of one leader. He suggests that only luck prevented the Cuban missile crisis from escalating into nuclear war, this in spite of rational men at the helm of government.

3. There's something beyond one's self.

4. Maximize efficiency.
In WWII, McNamara was stationed in Guam as part of an elite intelligentsia tasked by the US Air Force to maximize the bombing effectiveness of the new B29 bombers. Instead of traversing back and forth from India to China to Japan for the bombing run, a base at Guam would save fuel and ensure the best efficiency.

5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
McNamara's and his teams research led to the adoption of a new method of bombing of 67 Japanese cities, called firebombing, in which the high altitude B29s were to descend from their usual 23,000 feet to 5,000 feet, dropping incendiary bombs. 100,000 civilians were killed in Tokyo in one night in 1945. As an emotional McNamara reflects on this, he questions the appropriateness of force and concludes that there are no fixed guidelines for war. As his then-superior Colonel Curtis LeMay had said:

"If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals."

McNamara says:

"And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals.... But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"

McNamara, still haunted by the sheer cruelty of the bombings, nevertheless grapples with the amoral nature of war as the victors are the ultimate arbiters of morality itself.

6. Get the data.
The main reason for loss in bombing efficiency in WWII was the high rate of aborted missions which stood at 20%. McNamara's research concluded that most of the reasons for abortion were spurious and the aborted missions were the result of pilot cowardice. LeMay intervened, promising to sit in each mission as the pilots flew their sorties. The aborted mission rate plummeted. McNamara portrays the war-mongering LeMay well, recalling an incident in which a young captain had stormed into the command room after a mission, cursing those who had authorised high altitude B29s to fly at 5,000 feet, leading to the death of his wingman by gunfire. The usually monosyllabic cigar-smoking LeMay said that he feels the loss of that wingman he had sent on a mission, but the wingman is but one person, Tokyo has been razed to the ground.

One senses the grudging respect for LeMay amidst the adversarial clash of ideologies 17 years later in the Cuban missile crisis. There are similarities between LeMay and McNamara. LeMay, cold and bent on victory at all costs, was never averse to the use of force. Though reluctant and emotionally affected by civilian casualties, McNamara used the theory of "statistical control," a cost-benefit accounting procedure as stated in AJ Langguth's Our Vietnam, to calculate deaths during the Vietnam War. Whether McNamara believed in the pre-eminence of numbers and statistics and used this as an unemotional shield to the unpleasantness of civilian deaths, or whether he was the ever reluctant Cold-warrior staunchly defending LBJ during the Vietnam War is still unclear. He remains largely inscrutable as he struggles with reconciling the detached logic of numbers with the randomness of war.

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.

Often vilified as arrogant and termed Mac the "Knife" by the press during his much criticized stint as Secretary during the Vietnam War, McNamara makes an implict admission that the war was a wrong one. At Morris' prodding, he lets on that they [the Administration] saw what they wanted to believe in Vietnam. During LBJ's presidency, one false report by overzealous sonar men on board a US vessel of North Vietnamese torpedoes attacking them led to the gradual escalation into America's worst military debacle. The Cold War suspicions that the whole of Indochina and other smaller states would fall like dominoes to the scourge of Communism was the primary motivation for that war. McNamara says that the US did not understand its enemy the North Vietnamese.
He says:

"They believed that we [USA] had simply replaced the French as a colonial power, and we were seeking to subject South and North Vietnam to our colonial interests, which was absolutely absurd. And we, we saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War. Not what they saw it as: a civil war."

One questions why McNamara never learnt his first lesson, to empathise with the Vietnamese before invading the country. However, there are many more reasons for the gradual escalation into war beyond his control, one of which is the misplaced fear of the spread of Communism and Superpower rivalry. McNamara leaves the administration in acrimonious fashion in 1967, unable to agree with a war that he so strongly opposed morally, yet supported publicly.

McNamara remains defensive about his role in the War, attributing ultimate responsibility for the conduct of war to the Commander-in-chief - the President, and adds almost with indignation that when he left in 1967, the casualty rate was 25,000 killed in action, less than half the eventual total of 58,000.

11. You can't change human nature.
Definitely not a Wilsonian pacifist, McNamara believes that wars would go on as human nature is predisposed towards conflict. But he offers his views on US unilteralism vis-a-vis Vietnam as he says:

"I do not believe that we should ever apply that economic, political, and military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there. None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning."

Though he refused to draw analogies with the ongoing war in Iraq, the comparisons are stark.

As the documentary draws to a close, McNamara startlingly says:

"Never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wished had been asked of you."

This apparently undermines all he has said thus far, as it evokes images of McNamara, with his slicked back hair, facing the cameras during the Vietnam War, insisting beyond reason that according to General Westmoreland, good progress was being made in major operations.

However, this is hardly the slurred monologue of a bitter man, but an engaging testimony that pares McNamara down as it provides insight to the machinations of a complex mind - dispassionate and methodical yet sensitive and emotional. The luminous intellect of McNamara stands out as we view historical events through the eyes of a battled-hardened Cold-warrior, skilfully captured (almost) unadorned.

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