Sunday, February 22, 2004A bunch of us went to see the movie "Fog of War" on Friday night. This is a very interesting documentary by a local director consisting almost entirely of an interview with Robert S. McNamara who was Secretary of Defense during the first half of the U.S. war in Vietnam and subsequently president of the World Bank. The film concentrates on McNamara's efforts in bombing Japan and Germany during World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War.
The first depressing take-away from the movie is that our intelligence efforts are almost worthless. The CIA assured JFK that the Russians did not have nuclear warheads in Cuba at the time of the crisis. The missiles were in place and the warheads on their way. In fact it seems that the warheads were already in Cuba at the time of the dispute. Not only that but Fidel Castro met McNamara face-to-face in the 1990s and said that he'd recommended to the Russians that they use them even though he knew that Cuba would be destroyed and all of its citizens killed. (N.B.: Personal ownership of a third-world country is a beautiful thing!)
The second conclusion from watching the film is that the U.S. has never won the hearts and minds of foreigners or even succeeded in changing foreigners' minds. We won WWII by using our industrial power to destroy the capacity of the Japanese and Germans to carry out their objectives, not by convincing the Japanese or the Germans of anything or changing their minds or objectives.
[Philip Greenspun Weblog]
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A critical part of the role of judges is deciding who can sue for what, but these days anyone can sue for just about anything.[via Overlawyered < The Legal Reader] [jenett.radio]
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