Looking Back Through “The Fog of War”
War and violence, even if proclamations of pacifism seem to echo throughout modern liberalism, is something that is intrinsically inseparable from the chambers of liberal institutions. The ways in which violence is defined and justified and monopolised by these institutions presents an insurmountable hurdle for reformism — a naïve notion that steady symptomatic changes will have a prolonged progressive effect on the nature of such institutions. Although some discussions of police and prison abolitionism, drug decriminalisation, and subsequent reparations have certainly entered mainstream discussions, that is not to say that any of them have had a welcoming or substantial presence. Such is the nature of the governance that protects these institutions that they inevitably attract those for whom these vestibules of violence are revered spaces, regardless of whether their “intentions” are good. One such contemporary figure in UK politics who personifies this is political mentality is Keir Starmer; the former Head of the Crown Prosecution Service now serving as the leader of the Labour Party at a time when criticisms within left-wing circles around legal and judicial systems are so verdant. Likewise in the US, Kamala Harris was recently appointed as Vice President under Joe Biden — a former District Attorney who was appointed by the Democrats only months after BLM took action against police brutality and the racist essence of the police. These figures are certainly not outliers — such instances are well-documented and well-scorned throughout history and will likely remain to be for years to come. More importantly it demonstrates how, no matter how well-intentioned ones proclamations are, power and violence are routine bedfellows — many would argue them as conceptually synonymous — and wherever one lies, so does the other.
While certainly not one of history’s “Great Men”, Robert Strange McNamara nonetheless can be considered an important figure within the critical discussions of “Great Men” politics of the post-war period. A figure who embodies the rapid economic progression of post-war America and its presence on the global stage: a captain during World War Two for the US Air Force during their operations in Japan, the first non-family President of the Ford Motor Company, the US Secretary of Defence during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War, and eventually President of the WBG. A figure who — as embodied within this professional trajectory — characterises the presence of power and violence as a dual entity. Errol Morris’ The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara greets us with its poster — of an aged McNamara standing in his long tan overcoat, in front of the red stripes of the American flag. Paired with its subtitle of “eleven lessons”, it has the quality of a memoir cover; or perhaps mimicking the self-gratified trend of professional autobiographies and advice books that utilise the Self as a primary reference point for the advice they sell. In whatever case, there is more than a whiff of the commercialised individualism that typifies neoliberalism — but rather than being a naïve follower of such a trend, The Fog of War uses this philosophy of the individual as the incontestable sole entity of reason as referent; an active self-reflexive catalyst for the philosophy’s own internal collapse. “Eleven lessons” which are as self-referential for Morris as they are self-destructive for McNamara — an exposure of the liberal performativity that would come to the forefront of contemporary radical discussions.
In the vulgar spirit of the documentary’s channelled individualism, Morris’ documentary uses only one talking head throughout — McNamara himself. He is fashioned in a dark navy suit, aggressively country-club in its make-up but not entirely pristine as if to suggest a well-worn history. Slumped like De Niro as Frank Sheeran in The Irishman; an old man sat behind a pair of spectacles (an appropriate image of surveillance) left to reflect on an unreconciled and problematic legacy. Between his fingers twitches a pen — no simple biro or graphite pencil, but clearly an object of certain value; a minor thing that nonetheless comes to sway the meaning of the frames content towards the idea of this figure as a man existentially-tied to bureaucratic worth, state-sanctified intellectualism, and a stratified sense of establishment career mobility. It’s a moment that reminds me of Morris’ The Thin Blue Line when suspect David Harris goes to (if I remember correctly) scratch his face, revealing the handcuffs around his wrists — the orange jumpsuit and background already suggests his criminality, and even though there is no great narrative shift with this visual revelation, there is an undeniable shift in the shape of emotion that the scene registers as well as our own personal judgements. For it to be used within the context of The Thin Blue Line’s multi-layered procedural story is one thing, but with The Fog of War, there are no directly competing viewpoints — the conflict of ideas that Morris is trying to imply can only be reflected via a discord between the expressions of McNamara and the expressions of Morris himself as a filmmaker. A pen for McNamara, it seems, is not always just a pen — and in this respect, despite the film being All About Him, McNamara actually exhibits very little control.
At around the 50-minute mark, McNamara begins to reflect upon his time at the Ford Motor Company, overseeing a failing production line of consumer vehicles that are functionally death traps. Lives in the tens of thousands lost every year from negligence that, just like their competitors at Cadillac, emphasised a sleek aestheticism of post-war upwards-mobility over functionality. With respect to the circumstances of the time, this makes sense — his presence at Ford coincided with the burgeoning Cold War, where the false veneer of Western capitalism’s techno-supremacy looked down condescendingly on the comparatively-modest and collectively-minded proletarian industries of the USSR. But of course, the scientific and “innovative” functionality that McNamara suggested prevailed, albeit with some typical conservative backlash regarding the perceived future of seatbelts. And while those death figures dropped, it’s still an inescapable fact that the death toll for car fatalities still remained (and to date remain) unreasonably high. Archival document close-ups of corporate death stats, technology faults, and percentage failures flashing by in quick succession are not designed for us to pause-and-linger (although media now certainly allows for that) but to almost overwhelm us — to project to us an inability to grasp the extent to which capitalism innately projects an expendable view of human life. The totality of destruction measured within the metrics and definitions set out by institutional success — the protection of corporate interests and how such protections benefit those who work within it (both financially and reputationally). In terms of how this factors into the film’s thematic whole, one need only look a few minutes before this scene, at a moment when McNamara reflects upon his time in the military working with statistics and analytics under Air Force general Curtis LeMay. He discusses LeMay’s insistence that the carpet-bombing of Japanese cities was morally justified. McNamara argues for a more functional approach to bombing, suggesting that these new bombers — capable of flying high enough to avoid anti-aircraft weaponry — should just simply fly lower to avoid wasteful mass death and destruction. His decision does indeed lead to a more “efficient” bombing raid, but also to the death of one American pilot — a problem which, in LeMay’s mind, is more unjustifiable than the consequences of carpet-bombing entire cities. Again, as McNamara rambles on, we are privy to document-after-document of death stats — cold numerical figures and offensively bureaucratic black-and-white calculations that suggest, but certainly do not admonish, the wastefulness towards life extolled by the US military and its leaders upon Japan.
These twin visual concepts — paired temporally one after the other, within the context of both McNamara’s career and his one-sided justifications and half-acknowledged guilt — flesh out Morris’ documentary as a work of cruel truth. There is, within the words of his regret, an unfulfilled tension — an acknowledgement of atrocities and wrongdoings, of being a witness and a bystander to mass terror, but without fundamentally addressing the source. McNamara’s stance is always to lessen the violence of institutional power and never to question it — he’s a man who talks with pride about his accomplishments, while using his own failures as an excuse to wax profound about how the errors of mass irresponsibility can be justified through the “fog of war”; projecting the false belief that some bullshit universality within human nature ultimately obfuscates any sense of true blame. But even as he waxes, the contradictions around him to continue to form. There is a sense that he does not have full control over the flow of his own dialogue, often finding himself at the whim of an interjection presumably from Morris himself, including an instance where Morris asks him about Vietnam and, rather than directly address it, McNamara decides to establish a historical foundation upon which he can begin to release himself partially from the burden of future potential blame. The edits within which McNamara is framed, twitching between sentences and ideas, and montages which juxtapose his words with the images before him, fundamentally rip him from any sort of true visual autonomy. Morris has presented McNamara with a false platform from which he can begin to naively recount all his accomplishments and failures, presenting such accounts within the dismal discursive format of “lessons” as if we were students at his own school of leadership and (God forbid) responsibility.
Leadership and responsibility. Power and violence. Right now I’m reminded of Major General Peter Wall who served as Chief of Staff during the UK’s military involvement in Iraq. Before the findings of the Chilcot Inquiry shifted the focus of Iraq War atrocities over to the likes of Tony Blair, Peter Wall became embroiled in a case in international criminal court regarding the abuse and murder of detainees under British military custody. Such allegations include several accounts of torture, religious humiliation, sexual assault, and mock executions — in short, war crimes that speak to the nature of warfare and political interventionism as fundamentally about displays of power. Funny then that not only has Peter Wall become the face of the Army’s new polished “social justice” image as an employer that is indiscriminate to identity, but that he also helped in the development of Amicus Limited: a consultancy firm that aims to bring Army-trained leadership techniques into the business sector. It is the same in war as it is in the factories, from Peter Wall to Robert McNamara, The Fog of War demonstrates how unchecked power — in all its various eminently-shapeshifting forms — routinely attempts to justify itself. McNamara as but one of its many agents, full of the false proclamations of intelligence and calmed consideration that ultimately exposes its (and its progenitors) ignorance towards lived reality.
