Fog of War

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched ‘fog of war’ a doc by Errol Morris about Robert Macnamara who was Sec. of Defense during the Vietnam war. it’s very interesting how much Morris can get to the ‘opposing argument’ when he only interviews Macnamara, and includes some archival footage. He doesn’t interview Macnamara’s critics, or other experts – just Macnamara. And yet I did get the sense of an alternative viewpoint.

Morris is famous for sitting the subject in a chair, facing the camera, asking him one question, and after the subject answers, staying quiet. The subject feels the pressure of the silence, and he assumes his answer was not satisfying, so he says something else on the topic. And some more. Morris stays quiet, and the subject begins to ramble, ramble, talking more and more, and eventually, Morris hopes, he says something crazy – something that reveals the inner heart, not the public face the subject wishes to show us.

Usually Morris had done this with a fixed camera. Morris places himself right next to the lens so when the subject looks at Morris, it seems that he is looking at us, in the audience. This time Macnamara seems still to be looking at us, but the camera shifts a little, gets closer, pushes Macnamara’s face screen left, then screen right. It’s a bit offputting, but more varied and bearable than the same composition for an hour and a half.

Macnamara was the statistician attached to the unit that fire-bombed Japan in the war. He tells something I had not realized, just how extensive and brutal the fire-bombing campaign was. The first night of it, in a raid on Tokyo, they killed 100,000 Japanese civilians. One night! Macnamara goes on to talk about percentage of cities destroyed. A lot. His final estimate is between 50 and 90 percent of over 60 Japanese cities was destroyed in those campaigns – all before the atomic bombs were dropped.

And he adds, that he and General Lemay, the man in charge of that unit, both realized that if the us had lost the war, they would both have been charged and convicted of committing war crimes.

He also asks rhetorically, ‘Why does an act become a war crime if you do it and you lose, but not a war crime if you do it and you win?’

But on Vietnam he’s less honest. All the same, it’s clear that he tells us one big lesson there: he, and the presidents, did not know what was going on in the minds of the Vietnamese; the Vietnamese didn’t know what was in the minds of the Americans. The Vietnamese were quite certain that the Americans had simply replaced the French and were trying to subjugate Vietnam as a colonial extension; the Vietnamese were fighting for independence and unification. Macnamara was quite certain the Vietnamese were wrong, were only tools of the Chinese and Russians.

But I think that all those American wars had elements of imperialism to them, even if it was not in the minds of the commanders. it’s just that ‘imperialism’ as Macnamara was thinking of it lay in terms of the British Empire, rather than selling Coca-Cola, and Firestone Tires getting rubber plantations, and the like. But Ho Chi Minh saw Coca-Cola and Firestone as arms of imperialism; he saw how American imperialism was different from the british model.

(written around 7 March 2009)