The Fog of War
God damn! Deja vu.
Dominoes falling. Jihad!
Jeez! Why can't we learn.
Dan's.
It's really weird how much Robert McNamara seems like Donald Rumsfeld, or vice versa. Both come across as these sort of quirky, too smart for their own good guys, who despite all that made insanely bad decisions.
As McNamara would describe, he was trying to get us out of Vietnam from the beginning, but Johnson was too much the tough guy to let it go. The whole thing seemed like watching the nightly news concerning Iraq.
Mcnamara's biggest point being that the US was completely wrong about the motivations of the Vietnamese and their relationship with China. Basically, the Vietnamese saw the US as successors to the French and thus occupiers, while the US saw itself as keeping the Vietnamese out of the clutches of the communists. The Vietnamese were willing to fight to the last man, and clearly we weren't willing to kill every one of them to win. Thank god, though after 58,000 Americans died, that barely seems like a consolation.
Very interesting documentary style is far less dry than one might assume.
Also to McNamara's credit, he seemed both humble and emotional about the appropriate things.
3 comments:
My thoughts after watching that documentary were, "Yeah, appropriately humble and emotional about 40 YEARS TOO FUCKING LATE."
It's all about these guys that are financial whiz kids (what was his background - automotive industry?) from the private sector suddenly be thrust into politicial positions where they're deciding on military policy for the most powerful country in the history of the world. It's nuts! It's, like, purple rabbits shooting out of your ears nuts!!! How is this possible?
Jesus Chris, I don't care about whether or not teary-eyed Robert McNamara finds his own personal solace before he dies. 58,000 Americans, countless Vietnamese are dead, with their lives destroyed. Not to mention the fact that we basically took an entire culture in Laos and threw them to the wolves as soon as the chips were down. Fucking hell.
My own haiku, by the way:
http://oliopolis.blogspot.com/2007/03/movie-review-haiku-fog-of-war.html
I understand your point, but at least insofar as this movie indicated, McNamara tried to end the war sooner than later, but Johnson was against looking weak.
He says near the end that he thought that if Kennedy had lived he would have ended it far earlier.
Also worth noting that McNamara was gone 7 years before the war actually ended. Nixon was elected in 68 and McNamara was no longer SoD. Something more than half of all US casualties happened after he left. Nixon won election partly by saying he had a secret plan to end the war. He lied. And much of the Cambodia and ALL of the Laos crap took place under Republican administrations.
That said, the whole thing was stupid, for the reasons I stated in the original post. We didn't understand why the Vietnamese were fighting us. If we had left they would have fought each other some, but most likely would not have ended up pawns of China or Russia.
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