The Fog of War

I saw about 20 minutes of The Fog of War when I was in Dhaka, and mentally bookmarked it as one of the movies I'd come back to. I was lucky to see it on the shelves on friday, and remembered to get it. I just finished watching, and am at awe of the brilliance of Errol Morris.

The movie is a 2 hour conversation between Robert S. McNamara, former secretary of defense, and filmmaker Errol Morris about Dr. McNamara's reflection of the various wars, and his roles in Viet Nam war. The movie's subtitle is: 11 Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.

The 11 Lessons: with help of Wikipedia, are:

1. Empathize with your enemy.
2. Rationality will not save us.
3. There's something beyond one's self.
4. Maximize efficiency.
5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
6. Get the data.
7. Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
8. Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
10. Never say never.
11. You can't change human nature.

Apparently, these lessons were devised by Morris, not McNamara, but it makes a fascinating coda into the conversation, which was distilled out of 20 hours of footage.

I particularly like this statement of McNamara, copied from this Wiki entry.

I'm not so naive or simplistic to believe we can eliminate war. We're not going to change human nature anytime soon. It isn't that we aren't rational. We are rational. But reason has limits. There's a quote from T.S. Eliot that I just love:

We shall not cease from exploring
And at the end of our exploration
We will return to where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Now that's in a sense where I'm beginning to be.