Subscription 790/year or 190/quarter

Fog of war

It is about understanding the mind of one's enemy.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

In the movie Fog of war Robert McNamara compresses his political experience into eleven doctrines. One of these is "emphatize with the enemy," which in the imprecise Norwegian language is translated to understand one's enemy. During the Cuba crisis, it was precisely this in the twelfth-hour understanding of the enemy's assessments that made one barely turn away from the nuclear war. In the political wrestling on the American side, there were people with in-depth knowledge and fingerspitzgefühl which drew the longest straw when the United States was to respond to internally motivated double signals from the Kremlin ruler.

In the Vietnam War, all of this broke down. The United States did not know his enemy and understood him even less. For the Americans, the invasion was part of the Cold War with its dominoes, deterrence and containment. For the Vietnamese, there was a civil war between the north and the south, which subsequently became a liberation war from yet another colonial power.

Many years later, Robert McNamara was almost castrated by his Vietnamese hosts as he hinted that the United States had only tried to save the world from Communism and Vietnam from China. For, the former US Secretary of Defense, who was even in the position for several years of this war, did not know that Vietnam had never been and never will become a satellite state for the Chinese, but that they had, on the other hand, fought dry fists against said people for more than a thousand years?

Human nature

I Fog of war you get Robert McNamara live for two hours. He is not a repentant sinner, but a reflective thinker about the war's most necessary absence of morality.

Understanding McNamara right, nations should try in every possible way to avoid the military confrontation. Therefore, he is clear that the United States should not act unilaterally in the world. Had the superpower followed this rule at the beginning of the 60 century, one would never have entered Vietnam. It would be a far better solution than the one chosen, not least in light of the fateful cold war facet that pushed down the local conflict.

However, war cannot always be avoided. One cannot change human nature, says McNamara. And: sometimes you have to do evil things to achieve the good.

But where does the moral boundary go for what is allowed and what is not? The goal is not to sanctify the funds, but the funds must be adapted to the goal. In Japan in 1945, they went far beyond what was rationally necessary to achieve what they wanted. Between fifty and sixty cities, the fire was bombed with the loss of over half the population. In one single night, over one hundred thousand people burned to death because Americans dropped fire bombs over Tokyo.

Aerial photo of Japanese big cities flickering across the screen. They are completely crushed. Only a few high-rise buildings remain. It happened before Atomic bombs were released over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A slaughterhouse world must have forgotten, and which was clad in moral legitimacy through the simple fact that the United States won the war.

What is immoral to the loser becomes moral to the winner, McNamara quotes. To him it is a descriptive truth rather than a normative, it seems.

On the other hand: how many could and should have been bombed in Japan towards the end of the war? One thousand? Or maybe zero? What kind of solution would that be?

Border lines in war. But boundary lines in war. It gives dimensions other than what non-war generations can grasp. Fog of War, simply.

War is evil

Fog of War. Robert McNamara took part in three potential and actual war theaters: World War II, the Cuba crisis and the Vietnam War. During the firebombing of Japan, he sat on Guam and was part of the military analyst team. During the Cuba crisis, he had already become Secretary of Defense, a position he also held under Lyndon B. Johnson – until 1967.

In other words, many years into the Vietnam War, which McNamara neither stirred nor desired; on the contrary.

But the message is nevertheless: war is evil and cruelty. In the war, judgment is weakened and reason is reduced. In the war, quick decisions must be made on the basis of unclear reports, chaotic fight scenes, slippery front lines and cruel assaults. In the war, decisions must be made that ultimately win.

Fog of War; a kind of blood fog, where the adrenaline rushes in, and where any military commander, if he does not choose to lie, will have to admit one misjudgment after another.

It is not the hero Robert McNamara who appears in this documentary, nor the villain. Instead, it is the story of the war, and the somewhat random circumstances that send perfectly ordinary people head on in meaningless carnage, which is told. During McNamara, it played out in Vietnam, today it plays out in Iraq. The people are changed, but the content is the same.

You may also like