Few opportunities in the study of history compare to looking into the eyes of an historical figure while he tells his story.  This unique feat is accomplished by the Errol Morris documentary “Fog of War”.  Unfortunately, few historical opportunities could be less credible than Robert McNamara’s latest accounting for his intimate involvement in the Vietnam War.  But this film is not about facts, or even “McNamara said, Johnson said”.  This film is the best illustration of the mindset and experiences that allowed Vietnam to earn its place in American history as her greatest colossal failure.  McNamara himself is the poster boy for how not to fight a war.  Yet his arrogance still allows him to presume to lecture as though he is Sun Tzu.  This film illustrates perfectly the environment that created the “Death by Micromanagement” strategy that McNamara still promotes.

Regardless of opinion on the Vietnam War, there is one point that most all agree on:  Robert McNamara is a pathological liar and a man of limitless denial.  Morris needs little to expose this in The Fog of War, he simply allows McNamara to expose it for him.  This point of agreement allows even those who would rather have simply won the war to view a film by an anti-war activist without tearing their hair out. 

The majority of disagreement about the film’s portrayal of the “inside baseball” account by McNamara is between war critics who need to find out just who was more of a cheerleader for the engagement in Vietnam, McNamara or Lyndon Johnson.  Eric Alterman, historian and major proprietor of the “Iraq is Nam” theology, wrote in The Nation that Morris is “…a brilliant filmmaker, but he is not a historian”.  Alterman felt that Morris misrepresented the relationship between McNamara and Johnson with his use of Johnson’s taped conversations.  These arguments seem to be made to add detail to the various Iraq parallels used to weight the anti-war argument of today. 

The Morris/Alterman spat centered on the various taped conversations of Johnson.  But it is the interaction of present day characters such as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George Bush that brings these old questions to the forefront.  Alterman states at the end of his rebuttal, “Substitute ‘terrorism’ for ‘communism’ and you have a contemporary historical tragedy made to order.”  It is the generation of Alterman and Morris that sees all conflict through the lens of Vietnam, making it a logical starting point in their minds for analysis of Iraq.  Though this colors any real grasp of the unique complexities and causal relationships of a completely different situation in Iraq (let alone a situation that is still developing and changing), it does shine a bright light on just how completely ill-prepared the United States was for Vietnam.  This was supposedly the real reason for the movie and is its true historical value.  There is, after all, a difference between learning from history and using history to achieve a self-fulfilling prophesy, a delicate (although common) ethical situation these two historians have placed themselves in.  One can use the Marshall Plan as a historical model and forecast a completely different future result in Iraq.  But Vietnam is over and that story can be told in the ramblings of Robert McNamara.

It is in McNamara’s “eleven lessons” where the story lies.  Some of his lessons are obvious and a major part of military planning currently, such as the first, “empathize with your enemy”.  It apparently would surprise many unfamiliar with the military (McNamara included) that this lesson is a basic tenant of war strategy.  Some are just hopelessly circular, such as his second, “rationality will not save us”.  This illustrated just how traumatized this man is by his experiences and he expands on this in his narrative of the firebombing of Japan.  Lesson eleven is one that anti-war activists should pay close attention to: “you can’t change human nature”.  After all, even if you don’t fight, someone always will.  This does guarantee that peaceniks will always have something to be upset (and fight) about, hopefully avoiding a return of the 60s and 70s method of burning buildings and shooting cops in the name of peace.

The blueprint for failure in war is laid out in lesson five, “proportionality should be a guideline in war.”  This is because of his basic contradictions in how he waged war.  On one hand, he focuses on statistics, analysis and data.  On the other, he understands that reasoning and data are often wrong.  Then he contends that based on data and reasoning that is not reliable, a “proportional” strategy should be placed on the military.  His rules don’t focus on the military need to define the goal and achieve it as quickly as possible with absolute force.  McNamara prefers to create an obsessive compulsive balance of military paralysis that guarantees stalemate and casualties.  And in case anybody misses it, he sums it up with “proportionality should be a guideline in war”.

The Vietnam War was run from beginning to end with “proportionality”.   Responding little by little over the years with more advisors, then air support, then troops, the U.S. government always upped the ante proportional to maintaining the status quo.  Very little was invested in actually defining an end game, it was just assumed that some version of the Korean stalemate would be established to hold the communists back.  ‘Wait ‘em out’ was the genius long term strategy to combat The Domino Effect.  And it led to “McNamara” thinking in the execution of war. 

If any context was necessary to expose McNamara’s lessons, it comes in loads with his statements about other military leaders.  He is horrified by the fire bombings ordered by General LeMay on Japan in World War II, and uses Sherman’s burning of Atlanta during the Civil War to justify his misdeeds while at the same time condemning them with himself as war criminals.  However, both LeMay and Sherman won their battles, and their nation subsequently won the wars their battles were part of.  They did not use “proportionality”, yet McNamara still clings to a fantasy of the sanitized, statistical war that could have been.  His ability to disconnect his decisions from the loss of the war by assuming that it was lost before it began (in retrospect) is fascinating.  If Sherman had failed it is very likely that the Union would have also failed.  Sherman knew (as did LeMay) that the only way to end the war was to destroy the will of the enemy to fight.  McNamara, even after such a hard lesson, does not want to face that in this film.  “Win at all costs” is still the primary rule once the threshold of war has been crossed.  The malaise of the Carter Administration and the Iran embassy takeover of the late 70s is all the proof needed to show the repercussions of geopolitical failure in armed conflict.

And just who lost the “will to fight” in Vietnam?  The answer to that question is obvious.  But why were the American people convinced that they had no responsibility to a region and millions of people they had already been intimately involved with for so many years?  Certainly strategic incompetence leading to endless deaths was a factor. That occurs in all wars.  The Battle of the Bulge was a disaster, yet the U.S. fought on. But perception is reality.

And who supplied the information used in creating public perception?  The supposedly objective and incorruptible Fourth Estate was the information source for the American people.  The media trumpeted the Tet Offensive as the beginning of the end, but conveniently forgot to explain the asterisk that the Tet offensive accomplished absolutely nothing militarily, and that the Viet Cong made no advances by the end of the battle. Today the Vietnamese characterize Tet as a ploy to use the media to demoralize the American people in an exhibit in their war museum in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon).  Such historical characters as Jane Fonda and John Kerry are immortalized as heroes, while American military are all war criminals.  Such is War.  But the results of the American “hand washing” are ignored by the media and anti-war activists in the United States.  Few ask of the fate of our former allies and their families within the Vietnamese society of Ho Chi Minh

. The class genocide of Pol Pot in Cambodia is disconnected from communism and the fall of Vietnam by the press and the academia that creates the press.  They prefer to blame the losers of the war.  Such is war.

And that is the problem with the anti-war movement of today.  Today’s peaceniks are only too willing to repeat the entire timeline of Vietnam just to be right, even while knowing the catastrophic result.  In Iraq there is no North and South, no superpower backing to restrict strategy, and an end that is not yet written.  The potential for mass genocide, however, is “made to order”, as Alterman states.  The anti-war movement’s denial about the risk of abandonment is parallel to the same denial held to this day about the end of Vietnam.  War supporters have to wonder if it is the deaths of war being opposed, or American success in war.  Is this an unreasonable conclusion?  

“Uh, there was not a massive bloodbath in Vietnam. There were reeducation camps, and they weren't pretty and, and, and, you know, uh, nobody, you know, likes that kind of outcome. But on the other hand, I've met lot of people today who were in those education camps, who are thriving in the Vietnam of today.”

                                                                         -John Kerry

                                                                         C-Span July 24^th, 2007

Morris, Alterman and Kerry condemn the failed strategies of McNamara, yet support the failed strategy of withdrawal that left 165,000 to perish in reeducation camps and millions more at the hands of Pol Pot in Cambodia.  The death toll of withdrawal does not seem to be the issue for Morris, Alterman or Senator Kerry.  The military casualties do not compare to Vietnam, as more soldiers have died in peacetime years than a year in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.  In 1981, for instance, 2,380 died on active duty with no shooting conflict.  In 2005 1,981 perished in service.  So, the survival of civilians and allies should ostensibly be paramount.  Perhaps the anti-war activists should be reminded that in geopolitics you can’t just “take it back”.  What would cause more hostility to the United States, meddling in Iraq or abandoning millions who supported us to torture and death?  Maybe it would be helpful to attempt a better ending to our current story than a pasted on ending from the past.