War and Never Having to Say You're Sorry
December 14, 2003
By SAMANTHA POWER
SOMETIME in the mid-1960's, the Vietnam War became known as
"McNamara's War." In the seven years Robert S. McNamara
served as Secretary of Defense for Presidents John F.
Kennedy and Lyndon. B. Johnson, the United States
commitment in Vietnam soared - in a soothingly gradual
fashion - from fewer than a thousand Americans to just
under half a million. Mr. McNamara, in turn, went from
being heralded as a whiz kid to being hounded as a war
monger. In 1965, a Quaker protester set himself on fire
below Mr. McNamara's Pentagon office window. In 1967,
antiwar activists tried to burn down the his vacation home
in Aspen, Colo. And in 1972, an artist who spotted him on a
ferry tried to heave him into the Atlantic Ocean.
[McNamara also had a great deal to do with the “Report
from Iron Mountain.”]
A quarter of a century later, Mr. McNamara broke his
silence, publishing "In Retrospect," his best-selling
memoir. He asked how he and his fellow leaders could have
pushed for a war he at last acknowledged was "wrong,
terribly wrong." But after the deaths of three million
Vietnamese and more than 58,000 Americans, many saw Mr.
McNamara's public reckoning as, at best, incommensurate
with the carnage and at worst, dishonest and self-serving.
In a stinging editorial in 1995, The New York Times
dismissed his "prime-time apology and stale tears, three
decades late," contrasting the fates of the dead with that
of Mr. McNamara, who, despite his torment, "got a sinecure
at the World Bank and summers at the Vineyard."
The debate over Vietnam and the debate over Robert McNamara
- debates that overlap, but that over the years have grown
distinct - refuse to subside, partly because Mr. McNamara,
now 87, refuses to go away. In "The Fog of War: Eleven
Lessons From the Life of Robert S. [STRANGE] McNamara," opening
Friday, Errol Morris, the ingenious Cambridge-based
director of such documentaries as "The Thin Blue Line" and
"Mr. Death," has given Mr. McNamara a big-screen chance to
reflect upon a career of watching fallible human beings
like himself make decisions that imperil or extinguish
human lives.
While Mr. McNamara uses the film to propagate the "lessons"
of his six decades in public life, Mr. Morris has another
agenda: to raise questions that are moral, timeless and
rarely broached with such subtlety. How do decent men
commit or abet evil acts? And once they have done so, how
should they interact with their victims, live with their
consciences and pass along their insights? It is the
indefatigable relevance of these questions that keep
Americans at once enthralled and repelled by Robert S.
McNamara. And it is the long-standing aversion of American
decision-makers to address past mistakes that has helped
undermine the American standing around the world and has
hindered our ability to learn from history.
[The Illuminati Nazis did the same thing during WWII but on a
larger scale. Read some articles on the End Times and Hitler’s
occult practices. These bastards are just getting warmed up.
Check out McNamara’s friends on the lists of the CFR, TC, and
Bildebergs. These people do not care about regular human beings.
They have no feeling for us at all. We’re cattle for them to work and then kill.]
Mr. Morris is a first-class investigator, and he has hunted
down fresh and provocative material, on subjects like the
firebombing of the Japanese in World War II and Kennedy's
intentions regarding Vietnam. He has elicited from Mr.
McNamara a number of startling admissions. And he has
released the film at a time when war and quagmire are very
much on the mind of Americans. Revisiting Vietnam and the
images of sprightly young G.I.'s so eager to serve, one is
reminded how soldiers can be led astray by reckless
ideology, shoddy intelligence and liberal hubris; how
small, sequential decisions necessitate and compound one
another; and how our faith in our own good intentions and
our ignorance of local culture can undermine our
objectives. (Among the 11 lessons Mr. Morris gleans from
Mr. McNamara, Lesson No. 1 is "empathize with the enemy.")
But Mr. Morris is less interested in policy than in
metaphysics. In a recent interview in New York, where he
was promoting the film, he said he first became interested
in Mr. McNamara because of an "endless fascination" with
the extent to which "people who engage in evil believe in
some real sense that they are doing good." [These Devil
Worshippers serve the Antichrist.] Mr. Morris seems
reflexively drawn to the gray zones of human morality. If
"real Iagos" permeated the planet, the filmmaker rightly
notes, life would be simpler, and in the end, probably
safer. But the story gets more complicated when a man like
Robert McNamara - who is not only debonair, but
introspective and self-critical - comes along. "If evil is
somewhat more ineluctable, it also becomes somewhat more
problematic," Mr. Morris observes. "What is it? Where is
it? Is it in some of us? Is it in all of us?"
And under what circumstances, he might have added, can we
rationalize it? The most stirring scenes in "The Fog of
War" surround America's firebombing of 67 Japanese cities
in World War II, during which time Mr. McNamara was working
under Gen. Curtis LeMay of the Air Force. Mr. Morris
unearthed spine-curdling government reports showing the raw
calculus undertaken to speed America's victory. "In order
to do good," Mr. McNamara says, articulating the film's
ninth lesson, "recognize that at times you will have to
engage in evil." [Check the lists. These “people” ARE evil.]
In a single bombing raid, he recalls, "Weburned to death 100,000
Japanese civilians in Tokyo - men,
women and children." Some 900,000 Japanese civilians were
killed overall. Was he aware this would happen? "Well, I
was part of a mechanism that in a sense recommended it,"
Mr. McNamara tells Mr. Morris. "Lemay said, `If we'd lost
the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.'
And I think he's right. He - and I'd say I - were behaving
as war criminals." He asks, "What makes it immoral if you
lose and not immoral if you win?" The answer, of course, is
that war's winners write the history books, and, if they
can help it, they avoid legal accountability.
When it came to the Vietnam War, Mr. McNamara was an early
advocate of escalation but came to realize the flaws in the
American approach earlier than many of his colleagues. Yet
in public, he continued to defend the war. And even after
he was forced out by President Johnson in 1967, he refused
to air his criticisms, though the war raged on for another
eight long years.
Today he declines comment on Iraq out of the same sense of
bureaucratic loyalty. To the suggestion that dissent is
often the highest form of loyalty, he responds, "I think
it's irresponsible for an ex-secretary of defense to
comment, particularly if the comments are critical - about
a president who is in the midst of a war with tens of
thousands of American lives at risk, and is dealing with
very, very delicate issues and relationships with other
nations and with the U.N., and therefore I haven't and I'm
not going to."
But Mr. McNamara's views can be inferred from the film.
"What makes us omniscient," he asks, rhetorically. "Have we
a record of omniscience?" He concludes, "If we can't
persuade nations with comparable values of the merits of
our case, we better re-examine our reasoning."
[After McNamara left government work, as a reward
he was given the job as the president of the World Bank,
which, along with IMF, is killing more people each day
than all the Americans killed in Vietnam.]
Re-examining our reasoning is not something that has come
naturally to American statesmen. In fact, Mr. McNamara is
one of very few senior American government officials ever
to admit major error without being forced to do so. In an
interview last month, I asked him why. "People don't want
to admit they made mistakes," he said. "This is true of the
Catholic Church, it's true of companies, it's true of
nongovernmental organizations and it's certainly true of
political bodies. My rule has been to surface the tough
problems. It's very unpleasant to argue with people you
admire and associate with. But you have to force debate."
BY now, Mr. McNamara has learned how to speak about the
trauma in his past in much the same way one learns to speak
of the death of a loved one: by rote. In our conversation,
he often repeated verbatim what he had said on camera. If a
question probed tender territory, he pivoted, transitioning
skillfully to one of his policy causes, like nuclear
nonproliferation or the International Criminal Court. But
despite all his best efforts, Mr. McNamara still broke down
several times during the filming of "The Fog of War" - "a
sign of weakness," he told me, embarrassed. On camera, he
remains stoic as he says that his wife and son got ulcers
when he was secretary of defense, and that his wife, who
died in 1981, "may even ultimately have died from the
stress." Mr. McNamara's emotions get the better of him when
he goes on to say something he must know to be untrue.
"But," he insists, waving his pen for emphasis, "they were
some of the best years of our lives and" - here the tears
start - "all members of my family benefited from it." He
quickly masters the lump in his throat, and proclaims,
unconvincingly: "It was terrific." In our interview, Mr.
McNamara's eyes filled with tears at precisely the same
moment. Though some politicians are known to muster tears
as a ploy for sympathy, in the case of Mr. McNamara, who is
famously controlling, they seemed anything but calculated;
rather, they offered evidence that his public poise is
outmatched by his personal demons.
[If it’s so easy for him to kill millions of people, how
hard is it for him to lie.]
Remarkably, what seems to grate at people most about Mr.
McNamara these days is less his role in shaping a
disastrous Vietnam policy than what many take to be his
public martyrdom. While it is true that his reckoning is
partial and unsatisfying, and while it is true that the
book did help launch him back into the limelight, it is
also true that he had a lot to lose by awakening the ghosts
of Vietnam. By choosing to excavate the past, he has
exposed himself to ridicule, resuscitated his lowest
moments in public life and let an emotional genie out of
the bottle. And since Mr. McNamara seems to have generated
more scorn than those who never acknowledged error - e.g.,
Dean Rusk, Henry Kissinger, and three American presidents -
it is unlikely that other officials will be eager to follow
his example.
In the absence of full-fledged Congressional
investigations, American policymakers rarely look back.
They are bound by continuity and fealty across
administrations and generations. With the proliferation of
class-action suits and the advent of global courtrooms,
American officials are now explicitly counseled to avoid
public reckoning, for fear of creating legal liability (or
constraining their ability to do it all over again, when it
suits them). Whether regarding the Vietnam War, America's
cold war assassinations or our misguided former alliance
with Saddam Hussein, American officials keep their eyes
fixed on the future. They rarely admit responsibility for
failure, for costly meddling or for large-scale human
suffering. They resist debate - internally or publicly - on
how good intentions went astray. And they most certainly
don't apologize to those harmed.
On those the rare occasions when American officials have
expressed remorse for previous policies, they have tended
to do so offhandedly. And while on these shores, such
utterances were ignored or derided as insincere, in the
countries grievously affected, many victims and survivors
welcomed the gesture with surprising grace.
In keeping with tradition, Mr. McNamara has never
apologized to the Vietnamese or the American people for the
Vietnam War. But he has broken with house rules by
expressing regret for mistaken policy choices. "I'm very
proud of my accomplishments," he says in the film. "I'm
very sorry that in the course of accomplishing something I
made errors."
Errol Morris says Mr. McNamara's failure to apologize used
to trouble him. But after taping 23 hours of interviews
with him, and sharing many more meals and phone calls, the
discomfort subsided. In truth, Mr. Morris says, he has come
to like Robert McNamara, and to understand why so many of
the tirades against him find fault with a "mea culpa" that
he never issued. "An apology empowers us," Mr. Morris said,
during our interview. "The person says, `I'm very, very,
very sorry,' and we can say, `I accept your apology,' or we
can say, `Sorry, but saying sorry is not enough.' People so
strongly wanted to say, `I do not forgive you for what
you've done' that they imagined an apology that didn't
exist."
Of course, compiling the lessons of history hardly
guarantees that they will be applied. Soon after Donald
Rumsfeld assumed the job of secretary of defense in 2000,
he actually took the unusual step of circulating a handout
that distilled his 40 years of service. Mr. Rumsfeld's
lessons were not dissimilar from those Mr. Morris elicited
from Mr. McNamara. They include:
"It is easier to get into something than to get out of it."
"Don't divide the world into `them' and `us.' "
"Visit with your predecessors from previous administrations
. . . Try to make original mistakes, rather than needlessly
repeating theirs."
The lessons, known as "Rumsfeld's Rules," were posted on
the Pentagon Web site when Mr. Rumsfeld took office. They
have since been removed.
Samantha Power's book, "A Problem From Hell: America and
the Age of Genocide," won the Pulitzer Prize in general
nonfiction this year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/movies/14POWE.html?ex=1072500112&ei=1&en=4eb02a4c28b02c19
[Like the historians after WWII, Mr. Morris has missed
the real reason why McNamara could do what he did to these
people and entire nations so easily, so happily. "They were
some of the best years of our lives and" - here the tears
start - "all members of my family benefited from it." The Nazis were
following a satanic agenda, just like McNamara and the crew he’s a
part of. McNamara doesn’t really admit to making mistakes
because, in his mind and the minds of the other Illuminati,
he thinks he did a pretty damn good job for his murdering team.]
READ MORE
READ JUST A LITTLE MORE