The Fog Of War
November 13, 2008

It is amazing how politicians are a lot smarter once they leave office than when they are in office. Perhaps being free of the institutional constraints enables them to think more clearly.

This week I have caught up with the award-winning 2003 movie The Fog Of War which is a documentary based on an extended interview with former US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara. McNamara is best known for his role in the Vietnam War and much of the movie enables him to reflect on what he now knows about warfare.

The movie was made around the time of the US invasion of Iraq but the ever-patriotic McNamara does not make any assessment of that war.

For those of us who opposed the Vietnam War at the time, the movie says little that is new – at least to us. What is interesting is how McNamara – even at the time of the war – apparently had doubts about what was happening. He was evidently not as enthusiastic about the war as we thought at the time.

I ran across McNamara years after the war. The then Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating in the mid-1990s established the Canberra Commission to generate new ideas of what should be done about nuclear weapons. McNamara was one of the elderly “great and good” recruited to serve on it. As a member of the Australian Foreign Minister’s National Consultative Committee on Peace and Disarmament, I got to meet the Commissioners when they published their final report.

I got talking to the elderly McNamara. It seemed amazing that this sprightly old man had been such a figure of hatred in the 1960s – he now looked one of the people eligible to go into an aged care centre!

McNamara in the movie makes 11 sensible points about the way that wars should be fought. The first point is the need for “empathy” with the enemy (not sympathy!). In other words put yourselves in the place of the other side and see what they are seeking. This is basic conflict resolution thinking – it is a tragedy that the man came to this wisdom so late in life.

I won’t run through all the other 10 “lessons”. The movie is well worth renting from the video shop to view – not least to compare these lessons with how the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are going! We don’t seem to learn much (which ironically is McNamara’s depressing 11th point!)

Something which can be inferred from the movie – but it is not explicitly stated in it – is that critics of particular wars are often proved right but only after some years.

McNamara recalls in the movie the way that Quaker Norman Morrison on November 2 1965 doused himself and his 11-month old daughter Emily with petrol and set light to himself under the Pentagon windows of McNamara. Passers-by could not save Morrison but yelled that he should throw the baby away out of the flames. Emily’s life was thus saved, while her father burned to death.

November 1965 was then very early in the direct US combat involvement in the war. The build up of American (and Australian) troops had only begun in the middle of the year. Morrison was therefore one of the first peace campaigners to recognize that the war was wrong.

As we now know, this particular death haunted McNamara far more than the many others for which he had indirect responsibility. This comes out well in the movie.

20 years after the war ended McNamara admitted that Morrison had been right – and he had been wrong. McNamara said that the war was wrong and that he regretted it. (McNamara’s book, published in 1995, is Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam

Morrison’s widow Anne and daughter Emily, with other relatives, visited Vietnam in 1999 as honoured guests. There has long been a street in Hanoi named after Morrison (“Mo Ri Xon” in the monosyllabic Vietnamese language) to honour his sacrifice. I walked along it a few months ago.