OK, well, just finished watching The Fog of War and it was very interesting and candid. I'm not sure what to think of MacNamara. On the one hand, there seems to be a large argument to be made that he was a moderate force in the conflicts in which he was involved. He certainly has a respect and sense of responsibility for the power and danger of government. He regrets much of what he did, and the sincerity of his intentions is difficult to doubt. He believes in duty and service, y'know, all those qualities our generation supposedly doesn't understand. He related a story about how Kennedy took full responsibility for the botched Bay of Pigs operation - even though MacNamara said that every single military and civilian advisor recommended he do it. Compare that to Bush and you get a sense of what our country has lost in the past fifty years. Accountability flew out the window sometime during the 70s, I suspect, and it won't return.
However, on the other hand, it was precisely this ideal of duty, accountability, and willingness to sacrifice that I believe was the problem in Vietnam and the problem now. This flawed idea that, somehow, government can advance ideas and ideologies and that that justifies people dying en mass. That government is not, in the end, just the business end of a big stick. MacNamara states point blank that if we had lost World War II that we would be considered war criminals for what we did. But he takes the completely opposite view as I do - he says we need to think about how to codify a just approach to war that minimizes loss of life. I say forget it - make war as horrible and brutal as possible, don't make it a game. You fight to win, so nobody dares fuck with you, BUT you only fight when necessary. Vietnam didn't start out with 500k troops on the ground - but it did end up there, and it happened because we tiptoed into a battle because we weren't truly willing from the beginning to accept the costs.
Yes, war is sometimes necessary in order to defend your nation - but the more you try to institutionalize it, conventionalize it, make it a more and more acceptable extension of politics, the more often you will have to wage it. Like where we are now as a superpower - perpetual war for perpetual peace. And all that does is just make war more and more acceptable, and destabilizes the world. No, war is horrible, and it should be accepted as such. It should be waged so terribly and brutally as to make each and every human individual determined never to accept the conditions of war from their leaders unless absolutely necessary - and even then with skepticism. I do not accept that we have to engage in these maintenance wars like Vietnam and Gulf War 1/2 (I do, however, believe that our foreign policy requires such maintenance, but it is that policy that should be regarded as the problem).
This sort of liberal idea that government is a force for progress in the realm of ideology and culture and economics is the problem, I think, and it's hard for the more academically inclined to accept (which is why I think our education system is so liberal). They're so married to the idea that government can manipulate the world stage to bring about some sort of "good". Then they cry over the eggs they have to break to make an omelet. You can tell the guy has a conscience about what he was involved in, and yet, after the war he went to work for the World Bank, a quasi governmental agency pushing globalization (i.e. free trade for special interests) on the world.
People who believe that the future lies in the individual have a long way to go in this world.
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