Review: The Fog of War

My Saturday night movie: "The Fog of War," a documentary about the life of Robert McNamara, who was the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War from 1961-68.

I'm not a huge fan of movies about war, but I recommend this one. The film is divided into 11 "lessons", with McNamara expounding on each one during interviews with director Errol Morris.

It was fascinating and heartbreaking to watch. Here's an amazingly intelligent man who was in a position of great power, a man who seems to be sensitive to humanity, who clearly wanted to do the right thing in a horrible situation, but even he wasn't able to stop the escalation of the war. Why? Well, it's complicated, and it involves issues of strategy and reasoning and morality and politics and human nature. At times, tears come to the now 85-year-old McNamara's eyes because he clearly regrets some of the decisions that he made.

Near the end of the film, McNamara says that "war is so complex it's beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables." If a man like McNamara can't see through the fog of war, who can?

It's not something I've ever contemplated before. I suppose I always thought when bad decisions were made in a war, it was because people in power clearly knew what the right decisions were but chose to go against them. But what if they didn't know the wisest course of action, simply because it was beyond them? Maybe there is no "right" decision in a war.

For me, the most heartbreaking aspect of "The Fog of War" was that at certain times when McNamara was talking about the Vietnam War, I thought he could just as easily have been talking about the war in Iraq. Have we learned nothing? Yeah, war is complex, but there's no excuse for not learning from past mistakes.