[Peace] The Fog of War tonight (Monday) at Allen Hall

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The Fog of War is open to serious criticism.  Here's some from the
political newsletter Counterpunch.org. --CGE]

	The Fog of Cop-Out
	Robert McNamara 10, Errol Morris 0
	By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

My dear friend and late Nation colleague Andrew Kopkind liked to tell how,
skiing in Aspen at the height of the Vietnam War, he came round a bend and
saw another skier, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, alone near the edge
of a precipice. This was during the period of Rolling Thunder, which
ultimately saw three times as many bombs dropped on Vietnam as the Allies
dropped on Europe in the Second World War.  "I could have reached out with
my ski pole," Andy would say wistfully, "and pushed him over."

Alas, Andy shirked this chance to get into the history books and McNamara
survived the 1960s, when he contributed more than most to the slaughter of
3.4 million Vietnamese (his own estimate). He went on to run the World
Bank, where he presided over the impoverishment, eviction from their lands
and death of many millions more round the world.

And now here he is, the star of Errol Morris's much-praised, in my view
wildly over-praised, documentary The Fog of War, talking comfortably about
the millions of people he's helped to kill. It reminded me of films of
Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and then head of war production. Speer
loved to admit to an overall guilt. But when he was pressed on specific
nastiness, like working Jews or Russians to death in arms factories, he
would insist, eyes ablaze with forthrightness, that he knew nothing of
such infamies.

It's good to have a new generation reminded of history's broad outlines,
like the firebombing of Japanese cities and Vietnam, but even here
McNamara's recollection -- surprising to many -- of his role in advising
Curtis LeMay to order his bombers to fly at lower altitude, the more
effectively to incinerate Japanese cities, goes unexamined.

Did the young McNamara, admittedly a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force,
really play such a role? I asked my associate, Rohit Goel, to check, and
he contacted Michael Sherry, Professor of History at Northwestern
University, author of The Rise of American Air Power. Here's what Sherry
e-mailed back:

"I did extensive research in the late 1970s and 1980s on the American
bombing of Japan, and especially on LeMay's decision to fly in at lower
altitudes. I do not recall that McNamara's name ever popped up in those
records, and since McNamara's was a famous name by then, I wouldn't have
ignored it. Nor was McNamara mentioned in the several hours of
interviewing I did with LeMay. While not denigrating his [i.e. McNamara's]
wartime record, I suspect there is some latter-day expansion of the
importance of his wartime role -- that not uncommon tendency of old
soldiers to inflate the past. In this case, there may also be a familiar
theme at work that surfaced, sometimes in ugly conflict, in McNamara's
tenure as defense secretary -- the superiority of civilian expertise over
military wisdom; perhaps McNamara is figuratively writing that theme back
into his story of World War II... In any event, I doubt LeMay saw McNamara
as a major figure in his decision-making, and LeMay's resort to
firebombing was the product of several factors (including pressure from
Washington, and simply the apparent failure of other efforts to do much),
not simply of the technical advice he received."

The documentary's gimmickry-cuts to black, Morris shouting his questions
away from the mike, McNamara off-center in the frame, montage of
typewriter-ribbon wheels, skulls dropping in slow motion down a stairwell,
captions offering very banal "lessons" -- gives us a clue.

Morris didn't have much to throw at McNamara. He didn't do enough
homework, and it's no substitute to say he's evolved a technique whereby
we can look into McNamara's eyes. We can look into the eyes of anyone on
remote camera on the Koppel Show. So what?

Time and again, McNamara gets away with it, cowering in the shadow of
baroque monsters like Curtis LeMay or LBJ, choking up about his choice of
Kennedy's gravesite in Arlington, sniffling at the memory of Johnson
giving him the Medal of Freedom, spouting nonsense about how Kennedy would
have pulled out of Vietnam, muffling himself in the ever-useful camouflage
of the "fog of war."

Now, the "fog of war" is a tag usually attributed to von Clausewitz,
though the great German philosopher and theorist of war never actually
used the phrase. Eugenia Kiesling argued a couple of years ago in Military
Review that the idea of fog -- unreliable information -- wasn't a central
preoccupation of Clausewitz. "Eliminating fog," Kiesling wrote, "gives us
a clearer and more useful understanding of Clausewitz's friction. It
restores uncertainty and the intangible stresses of military command to
their rightful centrality in 'On War.' It allows us to replace the
simplistic message that war intelligence is important with the reminder
that Clausewitz constantly emphasizes moral forces in war."

As presented by McNamara, through Morris, "the fog of war" usefully
deflects attention from clear and unpleasant facts entirely unobscured by
fog. McNamara can talk -- I'll come to the Gulf of Tonkin incident shortly
-- about confusions, fog, about what actually happened on August 2 or 4,
1964, thus detouring unfogged daylight, of which there was plenty, about
the moral failures of US commanders including McNamara, waging war on the
Vietnamese.

Roberta Wohlstetter was a pioneer in this fogging technique back in the
1950s with her heavily subsidized Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision,
which deployed the idea of distracting "noise" as the phenomenon that
prevented US commanders, ultimately Roosevelt, from comprehending the
information that the Japasnese were about to launch a surprise attack.
Wohlstetterian "noise" thus obscured the fact that FDR wanted a Japanese
provocation, knew the attack was coming, though not probable not its scale
and destructiveness.

When McNamara looks back down memory lane there are no real shadows, just
the sunlight of moral self-satisfaction: "I don't fault Truman for
dropping the bomb"; "I never saw Kennedy more shocked" (after the murder
of Ngo Dinh Diem); "never would I have authorized an illegal action"  
(after the Tonkin Gulf fakery); "I'm very proud of my accomplishments and
I'm very sorry I made errors" (his life).

Slabs of instructive history are missing from Morris's film. McNamara rode
into the Pentagon on one of the biggest of big lies, the bogus "missile
gap" touted by Kennedy in his 1960 campaign against Nixon. It was all
nonsense. As Defense Secretary McNamara ordered the production of 1,000
Minuteman strategic nukes, this at a time when he was looking at US
intelligence reports showing that the Soviets had one silo with one
untested missile.

To Morris now he offers homilies about the menace of nuclear Armageddon.
It's cost-free to say to say such things, grazing peacefully on the
tranquil mountain pastures of his 87 years.

Why did Morris not try to extort from McNamarta, in those twenty-three
hoursd of interviews, some reflections on how people in their forties, on
active service in the belly of the beast, should behave. Would McNamara
encourage today's weapons designers in Los Alamos to mutiny, to resign?
Were the atom spies in Los Alamos in the 1940s right to try to level
nuclear terror to some sort of balance? How does McNamara regard the
Berrigans and their comrades who served or are serving decades in prison
for physically attacking nuclear missiles, beating the decks of the Sea
Wolf nuclear submarine with their hammers.

Even when McNamara's record shows to his credit, no useful point is made.
Ralph Nader tells me (and wrote it in Unsafe at Any Speed) that it's true
that when he was head of the Ford Division of the Ford motor Company in
the mid-1950s, McNamara did push for safety options -- seat belts and
padded instrument panels. Ford dealer brochures for the '56 models
featured photos of how Ford and GM models fared in actual crashes, to GM's
disadvantage.

But Morris could have put to McNamara what happened next. As Nader
describes it, in December, 1955, a top GM executive called Ford's vice
president for sales and said Ford's safety campaign had to stop. These
Ford executives, many of them formerly from GM, had a saying, Chevy could
drop its price $25 to bankrupt Chrysler, $50 to bankrupt Ford. Ford ran up
the white flag. The safety sales campaign stopped. McNamara took a long
vacation in Florida, his career in Detroit in the balance, and came back a
team player. Safety went through the windscreen and lay in a coma for
years.

None of this bloody corporate handiwork shows up in the documentary, which
opts for that showy footage of skulls being dropped down stair wells as
part of safety-impact studies. McNamara invokes the Ford Falcon -- you can
still see some of them bumbling around in the South -- as his effort to
push small cheap cars, and of course this claim goes unexamined too. The
US car companies put out small cars in the late fifties mostly to instruct
US consumers that small cars weren't worth buying (except for the immortal
Slant 6 Plymouth Valiant, rolled out in 1960 by Chrysler, run by
engineers), as opposed to the larger vehicles which was what the companies
were interested in making money off. The Japanese and Germans came in with
well-made small cars and, helped by Nader's attack on the Corvair (which
was actually a pretty good car) captured that market, just as they wiped
out the UK's poorly managed MG and Triumph in the Forties.

The eyes don't tell the story. McNamara is self-serving and disingenuous.
Reminiscing about his acceptance of Kennedy's invitation to come from Ford
in Detroit to Camelot, McNamara claims to Morris that he insisted he would
not be part of Georgetown's pesky social round. Nonsense. He took to it
like a parvenu to ermine, as more than one Washington hostess could
glowingly recall.

"It's beyond the capacity of the human mind to comprehend all the
variables," the systems analyst proclaims to Morris, which would have
afforded a better-informed filmmaker a chance to ask this cold engine of
statistical calculation for his take on the prime business of the
Pentagon, the allocation of pork.

Why did Defense Secretary McNamara overrule all expert review and
procurement recommendations and insist that General Dynamics rather than
Boeing make the disastrous F-111, at that time one of the largest
procurement contracts in the Pentagon's history? Could it be that Henry
Crown of Chicago was calling in some chits for his role in fixing the 1960
JFK vote in Cook County, Illinois? Crown, of Chicago Sand and Gravel, had
$300 million of the mob's money in GD debentures, and after the disaster
of the Convair, GD needed the F-111 to avoid going belly-up, taking the
mob's $300 million with it. McNamara misled Congressional investigators
about this for years afterward.

The Gulf of Tonkin "attack" prompted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in
1964, whereby Congress gave LBJ legal authority to prosecute and escalate
the war in Vietnam. McNamara does some fancy footwork here, stating that
there wasn't any attack by North Vietnamese PT boats on the US destroyer
Maddox on August 4, but that there had been such an attack on August 2. It
shouldn't have been beyond Morris's powers to pull up a well-reported
piece by Robert Scheer, published in the Los Angeles Times in April, 1985,
establishing not only that the Maddox was attacked neither on August 2 nor
4 but that, beginning on the night of July 30, South Vietnamese navy
personnel, US-trained and -equipped, "had begun conducting secret raids on
targets in North Vietnam." As Scheer said, the North Vietnamese PT boats
that approached the Maddox on August 2 were probably responding to that
assault.

The Six-Day War? Just before this '67 war the Israelis were ready to
attack and knew they were going to win but couldn't get a clear go-ahead
from the Johnson Administration. As the BBC documentary The 50 Years War
narrates, Meir Amit, head of Israel's Mossad, flew to Washington. The
crucial OK came from McNamara, thus launching Israel's long-planned,
aggressive war on Egypt, Jordan and Syria, which led to present disasters.
And no, Morris didn't quiz McNamara on Israel's deliberate attack on the
US ship Liberty during that war (with thirty-four US sailors dead and 174
wounded), or on the cover-up that McNamara supervised.

We have so many sponsors of mass murder hanging around, it would be nice
to see one of them, once in a while, take a real pasting. But no, they
live on into happy old age, vivid in their worries about the human
condition, writing in The New York Review of Books, passing on no honest
records about the evil it really takes to run an empire. So suddenly
people are shocked about a relative piker like George W. Bush and start
talking about Hitler. If only they knew. It's not that hard to find out.

As displayed by Morris, McNamara never offers any reflection on the social
system that produced and promoted him, a perfectly nice, well-spoken war
criminal. As his inflation of his role in the foe-bombing of Japan shows,
he can go so far as to falsely though complacently indict himself , while
still shirking bigger , more terrifying and certainly more useful
reflections on the system that blessed him and mercilessly killed millions
upon millions under FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon. I don't
think Morris laid a glove on McNamara, who should be feeling well pleased.
Like Speer, he got away with it yet again.


On Mon, 7 Mar 2005, Laura Haber wrote:

> 
> The Fog of War The latest film by Errol Morris Winner of the Academy
> Award for Best Documentary
> 
> Monday March 7 7:00pm South Rec Room of Allen Hall With discussion
> with Joe Miller of Vietnam Veterans Against the War
> 
> It is the story of America as seen through the eyes of the former
> Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara. One of the most
> controversial and influential figures in world politics, he takes us
> on an insider's view of the seminal events of the 20th Century. Why
> was this past Century the most destructive and deadly in all of human
> history? Are we doomed to repeat our mistakes? Are we free to make
> choices, or are we at the mercy of inexorable historical forces and
> ideologies?
> 
> >From the firebombing of 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo in 1945
> to the brink of nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban missile crisis to
> the devastating effects of the Vietnam War, The Fog of War examines
> the psychology and reasoning of the government decision-makers who
> send men to war. How were decisions made and for what reason? What can
> we learn from these historical events?
> 
> As American forces occupy Iraq and the possibility of additional
> military conflict looms large, The Fog of War is essential viewing for
> anyone who wants to understand how the American government justifies
> the use of military force. Combining extraordinary archival footage,
> recreations, newly declassified White House recordings, and an
> original score by the Oscar nominated composer, Philip Glass, the film
> is a disquieting and powerful essay on war, rationality, and human
> nature.
> 
> This screening is being done as part of Pol Sci 280 but is open to the
> public.
> 
> Laura Haber Program Coordinator of Unit One University of Illinois 68
> Allen Hall (MC 050) 1005 W. Gregory Urbana, IL 61801 (217) 244-2317
> lhaber at admin.housing.uiuc.edu
> 
> 
>