I have just returned home from having seen the amazing documentary by Errol Morris titled The Fog of War (IMDB entry) which tracks the career of Robert McNamara concentrating on his role as the Secretary of Defence for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. I was deeply troubled by having seen it and it has left me feeling quite pessimistic for the future of humanity.
I’ve never thought of McNamara of being an evil man but there are those that do who blame him for the Vietnam War. I was confused how the man that had had a major part in the prevention of the Cuban Missile Crisis turning into a Nuclear War could have been an instigator in the start of the conflict in Vietnam.
In the light of this and the parts in the film where McNamara is talking about General Curtis LeMay I am reconsidering my views on many world leaders particularly of Bush and Rumsfeld. Not that I am in favour of their policies now just that I no longer considering them evil just wrong. This however does scare me that there are rational people in the world – leading the world even that are capable of making very bad decisions.
Understanding your enemy is a crucial point that has been recommended all the way back starting with Sun Tzu but is continually ignored or not fully explored by military leaders today. US involvement in Vietnam was born out of a paranoia about the spread of Communism and they were fighting for the freedom of the South Vietnamese. The North Vietnamese however didn’t understand this and were convinced that the US were a colonizing power that they would fight till the last man in order to remain free from becoming slaves to the Americans. In turn the US didn’t understand that even if Vietnam was to go Communist they would never ally themselves with China because they considered China to be their biggest and oldest enemy.
There are lessons to be learned here that apply to the current situation in Iraq particularly the motives of the insurgents. What do the insurgents believe of the intentions of the US government? I think it possible that far from being haters of democracy or some such tripe that has been used to describe them that they may in fact believe that the US is really there to steal their oil and colonize their land. They may well believe themselves to be freedom fighters endeavoring to throw of the shackles of a foreign power.
