Fog of War

Saw Fog of War. It was a fascinating equivocation by Robert McNamera, the Secretary of Defense during Vietnam. The filmmaker's (Errol Morris) and McNamera's interests in making this film dovetail in an effort to understand and explain the colossal quagmire that was Vietnam, but are opposed when it comes to McNamera himself. Morris wants to understand him and open him up, while McNamera, seasoned pro at press conference cross-examinations, deflects and counters these questions while freely admitting he is doing so. The film is slightly dry, but I was thankfully alert enough to be interested and fascinated anyway. Morris has a nose for poignant images and intersperses McNamera's talking head with Koyaanisqatsi-like images of frantic, densely layered montage (and also some hackneyed domino-falling imagery. When he talks about Vietnam dragging on, we see soldiers trudging through mud up to their waist. Almost like... a quagmire, huh?) at another time he drops a human skull down a flight of stairs simply because the image is striking.

The main thesis of this film seems to be that Vietnam was far too frightfully complex to be easily explained. There was too little information and too many agents working and communicating at cross purposes. There's an incredibly poignant anecdote where McNamera relates a meeting between him and the Prime Minister of Vietnam (the name went by quickly, I believe Đỗ Mười (this was after the war was over)) where they nearly came to blows about the purpose of the fruitless war. The Americans saw it as an extension of the cold war, saving the east from Communism and The Domino Effect (cue falling domino visual) whereas the Vietnamese saw the Americans not as liberators, but as just another colonial power, seeking to subjugate them. They would never ally themselves with the Russians and the Chinese, didn't we know that? The idea that the entire meaningless war could have been avoided if only we had spoken sensibly to each other is tantalizing and infuriating. Very interesting to someone as profoundly ignorant of history as I am.

It's tempting, but I think fruitless to read this film with an eye toward the current troubles in the middle east. To do so is too reductive. McNamera (and Morris, via McNamera) is trying to understand war in general. We are rational people who do not wish to kill each other, McNamera points out, and yet we go to war. He does not ultimately have any simple answers, but argues (convincingly) that no simple answers can exist. Troubling, but honest and true-sounding at least.