Truth as War Victim
Review of Errol Morris’ documentary feature 'The Fog of War'

“What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win,” former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara asks. In war and in classic Machiavellian style, “evil” sometimes has to be done in order to do “good.”

By Bobby Tuazon
Bulatlat

It took less than a year for the world to find out the truth behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In fact this truth was all there for all the world to grapple with months before the March 2004 invasion. The only problem was that the voice of resistance – that the war was all about oil and power and not about WMDs – was muffled by the press and by the “anti-terrorist” bias built by the warmongers and their stooges like Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

In contrast, the truth about the Vietnam War of the 1960s-1970s was obscured by moral issues raised by the anti-war movement and the rising figures of American casualties that finally brought hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers back home in 1975. However, it was clear to the communist guerrillas who fought against the first “preemptive” war unleashed by U.S. imperialism, that they were fighting for their freedom and for their future alone.

Visiting Vietnam in 1995, Robert S. McNamara who, 30 years earlier was U.S. defense secretary and the chief architect of the war, allows a veteran general who had fought the American forces to talk about the past. Americans never learn a lesson, the general told him bluntly, as he explained the fact that the Vietnamese people were ready to die fighting a powerful enemy because it was their freedom that was at stake.

Indochina, of which Vietnam was a part, was a long-time colony of the French imperialists until their forces, backed by the United States, were defeated in a decisive battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Raising the communist bogey, the U.S. government ignored a Geneva agreement for Vietnam’s unification and elections and began its armed aggression. Justifying the U.S. intervention later, McNamara devised the so-called “domino theory” which warns that if Vietnam falls under communism the rest of Asia would turn communist.

McNamara’s chat with the former Vietnamese general is the post-script to the “The Fog of War,” a documentary feature film which was shown in U.S. cinemas and elsewhere – not in the Philippines – early this year. Directed by Errol Morris (of the “The Thin Blue Line” and “Gates of Heaven”), the film was adjudged the “2003 Best Documentary Picture” in the United States by the National Board of Review and several critics’ associations.

On the spot

In “The Fog of War,” Morris puts the former defense secretary, now 85, on the spot. Morris’ intimate interview with the man is interspersed with video footages and taped conversations of Vietnam war Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson inside the White House oval office.

As the main interviewee, McNamara reminisces about his life through three wars – WWI, WWII and the Vietnam War – making him one of the most controversial figures of the 20^th century. As a bombing mission analyst during World War II, he helped develop the B-29 bomber planes that flew fire-bomb missions over Tokyo and several Japanese cities where up to 60 percent of the population simply evaporated. Statistically, the missions were successful because they incurred less American air casualties. McNamara’s own air wing was involved in the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945.

In the documentary, McNamara defends his work as a necessary evil during wartime. “What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win,” he asks. In war and in classic Machiavellian style, “evil” sometimes has to be done in order to do “good.”

There is compunction and there is a shed of tears in the old man as he admits quite candidly the mistakes committed, mostly, he says, as a result of the Cold War fog when presidential decisions were influenced by complexities of the war. He fails to admit, however, that there was no truth to the communist bogey – that the reason the U.S. went to war whether in Vietnam or elsewhere in the world was to stop communism.

Shortly after the fall of the revisionist USSR, western investigators examined archives and documents of the former Soviet bureaucracy and found no evidence – like in today’s WMDs - of a grand plan to expand communism whether in Europe or elsewhere. President Harry Truman’s containment policy proved to be a farce.

Unwinnable

McNamara hints that the alleged North Vietnamese torpedo attack on the USS Maddox in 1994 never took place. But the fabrication obtained for then President Johnson the U.S. Congress’ Tonkin Gulf resolution authorizing him to wage full-scale war in Vietnam. He also urged Johnson, he says, that the campaign was “unwinnable.” But as a loyal soldier he had to follow the political wishes of his president and direct a ruthless war using the world’s most powerful military force.

He also says he was on the side of Kennedy that urged secret talks with Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. He found himself parrying moves by Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay – his former WWII air commander – who wanted to bomb Cuba immediately.

These confessions aside, the man stops short of revealing the depths of his accountability and how he precisely played his part in the killing and maiming of millions of Japanese and Vietnamese civilians. One gets the impression of the man haunted by the past and seeking exoneration for his sins.

But in his remaining lifetime, McNamara – the “IBM machine with legs” - is bound to fail in securing absolution. Aside from being not quite up front about his own misdeeds – since he talks only about the mistakes of his superiors, the Cold War and the war machine – he does not reveal an iota about the silent war that he would preside over after Vietnam. Shortly after he was forced to resign by Johnson, McNamara accepted a new assignment that he would serve for more than 10 years - as World Bank president. WB policies would create destruction equal to, if not greater than, the scale wrought by McNamara as a war technocrat. And this is one silent war that Morris fails to capture, either.

Would that the same American leaders who devised the post-Cold War warfare including the war on Iraq do a McNamara several years from now? Repentance comes last, indeed? Bulatlat

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