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The Fog of War
The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, is a 2003 documentary film directed by Errol Morris discussing the lessons learned during Robert McNamara 's tenure as the US Secretary of Defence.
Robert McNamara
- If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merits of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning.
- We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes, just to understand the thoughts that lie behind their decisions and their actions.
- Should you kill 100,000 people in one night, by firebombing or any other way? LeMay’s answer would be clearly “Yes.”
- I'd rather be damned-if-I-don't.
- President Johnson authorized bombing in response to what he thought had been the second attack . . . We were wrong, but we had in our minds a mindset that led to that action. And it carried such heavy costs. We see incorrectly or we see only half of the story at times.
- Belief and seeing, they’re both often wrong.
- [speaking about the Allied bombing of Japan during World War II]
LeMay said, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals . . . But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
- In the Cuban missile crisis, at the end, I think we did put ourselves in the skin of the Soviets. In the case of Vietnam, we didn’t know them well enough to empathize. And there was total misunderstanding as a result. They believed that we had simply replaced the French as a colonial power, and we were seeking to subject South and North Vietnam to our colonial interests, which was absolutely absurd. And we, we saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War. Not what they saw it as: a civil war.
- I think the human race needs to think more about killing, about conflict. Is that what we want in this 21st Century?
- How much evil must we do in order to do good? We have certain ideals, certain responsibilities. Recognize that at times you will have to engage in evil, but minimize it.
- We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe that we should ever apply that economic, political, and military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn’t have been there. None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can’t persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we’d better reexamine our reasoning.
- At the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. . . Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies.
Additional Quotes
- He [Mcnamara] walked into the studio and said, 'What is that?' I smiled and said, 'The Interrotron.' He said, 'Well, whatever it is, I don¹t like it.'"
See also
External links
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