The Fog of War -- We're In It Again . Last night, I watched the documentary, Fog of War, about former Secretary of Defense, Robert S. MacNamara, the Harvard-educated whiz kid who many call the architect of the Vietnam War.  It is the portrait of a brilliant, but profoundly troubled old man who weeps about selecting a plot of ground in Arlington in which to bury JFK, but is steel-eyed as he recounts bombing sorties that destroy hundreds of thousands.  While fighting hard to stay composed, it is evident that MacNamara is haunted by his own dark deeds and the human condition but remains stubbornly out of touch with the part of himself that orchestrated them.    The experiences he recounts - most notably, in WWII, devising ways for U.S. bomb to destroy most of Japan, killing over 100,000 civilians a day to presiding over the Dept of Defense for eight years of the U.S. in Vietnam - are stunning in his application of sophisticated management techniques and statistics to destroy lives and nations.  Were he not on the side of good, he observes at one point, he would surely be tried as a war criminal, to which I would add, on a scale equal to Hitler.       MacNamara is a very bright man and the film is well done, even if the interviewer couldn't quite decide whether to be in it or not, and therefore doesn't use a microphone for his own questions.  It's also a very valuable instructive tool - recounting in chilling detail how close we came to nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crises, the Cold War, World War II and finally Vietnam.  It is also heavily edited, I would imagine so that MacNamara could be firmly in charge, pulling back and stepping forward as suits him.  It is therefore filled with omissions and lies - the willingness of the U.S. to go to war to protect its economic interests and the fabrication at Johnson's insistence of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, a perfect analog to the trumped up intelligence Bush used to justify invading Iraq.        Although it is about history and the role of a man who dedicated much of his professional life to efficiently killing people (in the name of ideals and for our leaders, he would hasten to add, sounding very similar to generals in the Third Reich), the film is especially chilling as it lays out Eleven Lessons for our nation, several of which we are flagrantly violating today in Iraq; namely, 1, 2, 6, 7, 8 & 11.  In fact, the parallels between the folly of believing we could win the war in Indochina and our present situation in what was formerly Persia are so profound, it's a wonder there aren't more documentaries, novels, essays and intelligent discourse on the subject.  (Read Graham Greene's The Quiet American, written in the late 50s, and the folly of our efforts in Vietnam is plain enough for an 8th grader to get).       1. Empathize with your enemy.     2. Rationality will not save us.     3. There's something beyond one's self.     4. Maximize efficiency.     5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war.     6. Get the data.     7. Belief and seeing are both often wrong.     8. Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.     9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.    10. Never say never.    11. You can't change human nature.    What's even sadder is that as many mistakes and as much damage as MacNamara committed, he is head and shoulders above Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush administration.  That George W. Bush is out of the class of statesman is so obvious, I won't waste time describing how poorly he fares next to JFK, Kruschev and even fellow Texas cowboy, Lyndon B. Johnson.      Fog of War is an excellent film.  In MacNamara, Shakespeare would feel vindicated for creating some of his darkest characters.  Pure evil does exist.  It is, in its most extreme, as Hannah Arendt alleged after WWII, banal.
Output: POS