Fog of War

            After watching Fog of War I couldn’t help comparing it to Hearts and Minds. It was a totally different set up multiple interview clips versus just one interview, yet I still feel I got an equal amount of information out of it.  We believed Hearts and Minds because we saw the destruction of Vietnam through the actual video footage. Well, I believed McNamara because it was just hard not to, he played into many of the ethos tricks that Heinrichs talks about in Thank you for Arguing, and in turn he showed me a completely new perspective.

             I think that the personal commentary and hindsight of McNamara boosts his credibility and also is humbling when he admits to his wrong doings. Along with his many credentials he was just as suited for the job as any Secretary of Defense. The one lesson I liked the most was “Proportionality Should be a Guideline to War”.

            This lesson is also an underlying theme in the rest of the lessons, we should be more empathetic to the “enemy” and imagine ourselves in their shoes, on our soil. The documentary did a great job of exhibiting this idea when it showed the Japanese cities bombed and compared them with U.S. cities of equivalent size. To have half of every cities population wiped out is just unimaginable and at least makes me think twice about what is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan and their people.  You would think that after imagining this kind of destruction people would be more cautious and selective with their feelings towards going to war. However, as McNamara explains in his final lesson war is human nature and when men get caught up in the “fog of war” it is very difficult to decipher what is right and wrong, even in hindsight.

            What was so great about Fog of War was it’s inside view of what the executive branch was truly saying about the war. Which come to find out is nothing; so many times they didn’t even want to discuss it to the people  because they didn’t even really know the full story of what was going on. Until now I thought that there was nothing but lies and persuasion coming out of the politicians , but now I can see it in a different light, and through the conversations between McNamara and Johnson, they were in some ways just as clueless as the public.