I am often several months behind the curve. For example, I watched “The Fog of War” on video just last night, despite its release half a year ago. I watched it because several friends who I respect told me it was very revealing (I will be skeptical of their judgement from now on). It is Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, talking to the camera, interspersed with a little footage here and there.
McNamara looks into the camera and lies. Or maybe he didn’t know: most are lies of omission. But he lies about the Tonkin Gulf resolution; he lies about the US terrorism against Cuba. He presents false dichotomies: did ‘we’ have to firebomb Japanese cities and kill hundreds of thousands? He says, the alternative was having our troops invade Japan and die in the hundreds of thousands. Oh really? Did anyone look into the possibility of not invading Japan? He says, I can’t remember if I ordered the use of Agent Orange. Certainly it was used when I was secretary of defense. We don’t have any laws against the uses of particular chemicals. I certainly wouldn’t have ordered the use of anything illegal.
Basically, the movie was filthy lies and apologetics for the genocidal campaign against the Vietnamese. He actually went to Vietnam and berated the Vietnamese, asking them: “Was it worth it, making us kill 3.4 million of you?” As if it was the Vietnamese who chose to be slaughtered. He presents Castro as if he was insane because of his behaviour during the Cuban missile crisis, as if McNamara himself and Kennedy were not the aggressors. He forgets the missiles in Turkey pointed at the USSR that made the USSR want to answer with missiles in Cuba.
If the Nazis had won world war II, if one of the Nazis in the bureaucracy at the time had sat down 40 years later with a sympathetic director and talked about all the close shaves that he had lived through in his life, you would have something like this film. I wouldn’t recommend it. Neither do the various leftists who reviewed it at the time, like Alex Cockburn.
