The Fog of War: 20 Years Later

December 19th, 2023 marked the 20th anniversary of the theatrical release of The Fog of War, Errol Morris’s documentary about the career of Robert S. McNamara. McNamara, who served as the Secretary of Defense under Presidents Nixon and LBJ, was the chief architect and most vociferous defender of the Vietnam War during his tenure, but later came to express intense regret about his role in the conflict. 

If you’ve never seen the movie, you must. It’s one of my favorites for many reasons. First, I like lists. Second, it’s a rare exercise in humility, honesty, and somber reflection that shines through in a world that has grown to be totally shameless; compare the frankness of The Fog of War, for example, with the shifty vaguenesses produced by Donald Rumsfeld in Morris’s 2013 doc, The Unknown Known. And third, Fog has aged exceptionally well, by which I mean that its lessons are critical yet largely still unlearned.

It’s sadly ironic that the 20th anniversary of this seminal film is marked by a world teetering on the edge of a Third World War. Between Russia/Ukraine, China/Taiwan/The Philippines, and Israel/Palestine/USA/the entire Arab world, it’s tough not only to know when the first consequential domino will fall, but if it’s already fallen and the collective consciousness just has yet to catch up. The original 11 lessons Morris derived in the film and the 10 supplemental lessons McNamara himself provided for the DVD expansion yield a few revelations that stick out like sore thumbs in contemporary context.

AN EXPANDING AND THICKENING FOG

The titular “fog of war” is defined as the inability of the human mind to comprehend all of the variables of armed conflict. We can today easily include within that meaning social media and its effects on both military and diplomatic operations, particularly within the Arab world, which in the last decade has radically transformed because of platforms like Twitter. For example: for a solid week there was a total information vacuum surrounding the explosion of Gaza’s al-Ahli Hospital, and officials of every stripe jumped to fill the void with their preferred narrative. Hamas blamed Israel, Israel blamed Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the rest of the truth-seeking world was left to rely on OSINT scattered across the internet. Even now, while most of the world agrees that this was likely a PIJ misfire or an Iron Dome interception, doubts linger; international organizations such as Human Rights Watch have been calling for independent investigations, and we may yet discover new evidence that could change our understanding of this outrageous event. This is the “fog of war” in action; what were the diplomatic implications of each faction speaking in the absence of facts? Did the resulting public outcry over Instagram and Twitter cause Israel to delay its ground invasion? Did Jordanian leaders call off their October 17 meeting with Secretary Blinken because of the situation’s ambiguity? Will the Abraham Accords survive this critical fracture between the United States and the Arab world?

This was not even the first dicy scenario within the current war; when the conflict first started, video game footage made the rounds masquerading as cell phone evidence of targeted strikes. At some point early on, Jamie Lee Curtis posted a video of Palestinian children fleeing Israeli bombs—thinking they were Israeli children—as a pro-Israeli sentiment. Then there’s the matter of casualty numbers; the world argues about lagging data on a daily basis, and that lag contributes to the flow of propaganda (“propaganda” used here in a factual, non-pejorative sense), showing just how thick the fog of war can be.

It all reminds me of a great conversation I had some years ago with a foreign policy expert. I had posted something about non-intervention in Syria and they asked me why I felt that way. I had to be honest with them: my generation’s formative experience was 9/11, Colin Powell’s vial of white powder, and the WMDs that didn’t exist. I have an ingrained skepticism of anyone calling for war; this is my fundamental bias and it is not easily overcome. As McNamara puts it, “belief and seeing are both often wrong”—and whether applied to a hospital bombing, the Gulf of Tonkin, or 9/11, this has proven painfully valid in hindsight.

EMPOWER INTERNATIONAL LAW

Said McNamara: “War is a blunt instrument by which to settle disputes between or within nations, and economic sanctions are rarely effective. Therefore, we should build a system of jurisprudence based on the International Court—that the U.S. has refused to support—which would hold individuals responsible for crimes against humanity.” 

The great world powers, America included. have meaningless relationships or even non-relationships with the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court—from ignoring rulings to outright refusing to recognize the courts altogether—creating a norm of “rogue actors” who never face accountability. The leader of the free world shouldn’t in theory be opposed to these things—but because we refuse to play by the rules we helped write, other nations have inferred that the whole thing is kind of a joke. It is. There is no way around that reality. It sucks to say out loud, because so many people have sacrificed their time, their money, and their lives to build up this international system, but the greatest legal framework humanity has ever constructed is on thin ice because the actors therein don’t trust each other.

The implications are not just humanitarian, but also financial. You may have heard the term “de-dollarization,” i.e. the multilateral pull away from American economic leadership, especially among BRICS nations. Putin uses the Wagner group to smuggle gold and subvert the global banking system; China hit record foreign-direct investment in 2022; and the entire BRICS coalition seems hellbent on replacing the hegemony of the dollar, first by discussing an internal cryptocurrency, then by pledging to trade in local currencies.

One struggles to see a positive vision for the future taking all of these factors into account. A damning 2022 passage from political science professor Andrew Latham comes to mind:

“The United Nations Security Council is paralyzed; the norm prohibiting wars of aggression has been shattered; the institutions governing the global economy are faltering under the weight of repeated financial crises; and even stable regional organizations like NATO and the European Union are experiencing unprecedented centrifugal forces that are threatening to tear them apart… whatever new order emerges in the coming years will reflect some combination or synthesis of the national visions of the various ‘great powers’ that will demand a say in what the new rules, norms and institutions of global governance will look like… [the] old post-Napoleonic “concert of Europe” is the most likely historical analogue.”

If we cannot agree on a system that is enforced equally across the board, one where nations are true partners and non-nations are compelled into compliance through multilateral cooperation, then we will continue to slip into an abyss of worsening isolationism. Building the trust necessary for the repair of our world requires vesting enough resources in international organizations that even stateless violence triggers a multilateral response irrespective of transnational factions.

It also requires some demonstration of empathy.

EMPATHY IS NOT AGREEMENT; IT HELPS US DISAGREE BETTER

“If we are to deal effectively with terrorists across the globe, we should develop a sense of empathy—I don’t mean ‘sympathy,’ but rather understanding—to counter their attacks on us and the Western World.” In Fog, McNamara recalls the Cuban Missile Crisis and how President Kennedy came to empathize with Nikita Kruschev in order to better understand the Soviets’ goals. This is not to say that Kennedy caved to the Soviets, who were, at the time, America’s existential enemy; it is to say that understanding that enemy may have been the moment which prevented nuclear catastrophe. When we understand the self-interest of our adversaries, enemies, and allies, we are better positioned to navigate a turbulent world in our own self-interest, and, in practice, maintain the moral high ground. In today’s culture of chest-puffed bloviating, empathy may be more difficult; however, it leads to more principled and effective conflict.

Every day we must ask ourselves: what “side” of each current thing are we on? What are our goals, and what are our adversary’s goals? If those goals and our own are mutually exclusive, is there any world in which compromise can be attained? What are the potential costs if one side refuses? We can only begin to answer these questions if we have empathy.

WHO WILL TURN THE DIAL DOWN FIRST?

Rewatching The Fog of War is a deep breath; it reminds you of a time when people were more willing participants in self-reflection, when cooperation was seen as a strength and not a weakness; when people spoke less and listened more. While hysterical freaks like Lindsey Graham and John Bolton jog between primetime news shows on a nightly basis trying to get us to bomb Iran, I try to instead listen to those voices who try not to make things worse.

As the Presbyterian minister, former NYT war correspondent, and East Jersey State Prison educator Chris Hedges argues in War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, “reconciliation, self-awareness, and finally the humility that makes peace possible come only when culture no longer serves a cause or a myth but the most precious and elusive of all human narratives—truth.” At the end of Fog, one does oddly get the sense that Robert McNamara has accepted the truth. He admits war crimes. He reflects on the use of Agent Orange. He pleads for people to learn from his experiences. The takeaways: reflection is a liberating thing, even when it demands consequences; shame is palpably missing from contemporary society; and war is never simple. Bring back that culture, and the world will be better off.

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