The Fog of War
While I was on vacation in Hawaii (more on that later), I saw the newspaper headline of Robert McNamara's passing.
I certainly wasn't around during the Vietnam War, so I don't have any firsthand experience of what this man was like while Secretary of Defense (from what my parents have told me in the past, I imagine he was as unpopular as Rumsfeld, but probably a lot smarter).
In any case, I've always been intrigued by the tragic figure of McNamara: an impressively smart and intelligent young man who goes down in US History as the cold, calculating architect of the Vietnam War, one of the biggest US foreign policy disasters of our time.
I am reminded of the fantastic documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara I saw a few years ago. I highly recommend that everyone watch this movie. For those of you who are pinching pennies during this recession (or are just too lazy to run to the video store), a quick Google video search will surprisingly direct you to this grainy full-length video. Lots of disturbing parallels between the mistakes of Vietnam and our current situation in Iraq. One quote from Lesson #8: Be prepared to Reexamine your Reasoning, has stuck with me even today:
"We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe we should EVER apply that military, political or economic power unilaterally...if we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there!...If we can't convince nations of comparable values of the merit of our cause, we had better examine our reasoning."
There's lots of other good stuff in there, regardless of what your politics are. Everyone should see this movie.
I certainly wasn't around during the Vietnam War, so I don't have any firsthand experience of what this man was like while Secretary of Defense (from what my parents have told me in the past, I imagine he was as unpopular as Rumsfeld, but probably a lot smarter).
In any case, I've always been intrigued by the tragic figure of McNamara: an impressively smart and intelligent young man who goes down in US History as the cold, calculating architect of the Vietnam War, one of the biggest US foreign policy disasters of our time.
I am reminded of the fantastic documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara I saw a few years ago. I highly recommend that everyone watch this movie. For those of you who are pinching pennies during this recession (or are just too lazy to run to the video store), a quick Google video search will surprisingly direct you to this grainy full-length video. Lots of disturbing parallels between the mistakes of Vietnam and our current situation in Iraq. One quote from Lesson #8: Be prepared to Reexamine your Reasoning, has stuck with me even today:
"We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe we should EVER apply that military, political or economic power unilaterally...if we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there!...If we can't convince nations of comparable values of the merit of our cause, we had better examine our reasoning."
There's lots of other good stuff in there, regardless of what your politics are. Everyone should see this movie.
