the fog of war

We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time
T S Eliot, Little Gidding, Four Quartets

March 16, 2004

On a quiet night like no other, The Fog of War, winner of the 76th Academy Award for best documentary feature, premiered in Muscat. Fifteen days after walking the red carpet at the Kodak Theatre, Executive Producer Robert May flew down here for the film's first ever screening outside the US.

A documentary of monumental significance, it has 86-year-old Robert S McNamara talking straight into the lens about what happened during his term as US Secretary of Defence under Presidents John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. So what did happen? To put it mildly, everything that's shaped the world we live in now: the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis, JFK's assassination and Vietnam. He was the analyst who, under General Curtis "bomb away" LeMay, came up with the strategy to firebomb 67 Japanese cities, killing 100,000 people in one night. It was under his term that the US sprayed 50mn litres of Agent Orange over the Vietnamese that is still deforming and destroying their grandchildren today.

McNamara, whose middle name is Strange, was never understood. He has been called arrogant, a know-all, a walking IBM. He was the ultimate whiz kid, who viewed the world's problems as solvable through statistical analysis and logic. That unapologetic belief in himself would ensure his rise from Harvard Business School where he was the youngest professor in its history, to the presidency of Ford Motor Company where he was the first man not from the Ford family to occupy that position and finally to JFK's cabinet as Secretary of Defence. It also proved to be his tragedy, and that of millions on the other side of the world.

But this movie isn't meant to crucify, or absolve McNamara. "In the end it’s not a historical movie", says Errol Morris, “it is a movie about what we should do now.”

When accepting his Oscar, Morris said, "Forty years ago this country went down a rabbit hole in Vietnam and millions died. I fear we're going down a rabbit hole once again." And that is why this movie exists. To learn from the mistakes that come with experience. And no one knows them better than Robert McNamara. He quotes T S Eliot: "We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time."

But after 86 years and generations destroyed, learning is the least McNamara can do, and it is little comfort.

I stand with Robert May after the screening outside Shatti Cinema as the audience drifts into the night. He shares Morris' concern that half a century later, his country has not learnt the lessons. "Empathise with your enemy", the film's first nugget of wisdom proclaims. But America didn't understand Vietnam then, or the Middle East today. Indeed, a thought of McNamara's on South East Asia in the '60s is as applicable today to the American invasion of Iraq: "None of our allies supported us", he says now. "If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better re-examine our reasoning."

Of course, while holding all this quite justly against the US, let us not forget that it is ultimately the Americans themselves who made this film, the most important of them being McNamara himself. Somewhere there lies a possibility, and we must celebrate it.

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