The Fog of War

Most of the film is an interview with Robert McNamara, going back over his career in government, mostly dealing the war in Southeast Asia. He also deals with W.W.II, where he served with Curtis LeMay, the man behind the firebombings of mostly civilian Japanese targets, and he observes that if the Axis had won the war, they would all have been tried as war criminals. True in a sense, though I don’t think either the Nazis or the Japanese would have bothered with trials, they would have simply stood all the generals and political leaders up against a wall and shot them. Ideas of warfare have changed since 1945, there is no way we would do now what we did in Japan unless we had already been hit with nuclear weapons … I think. Of course, before George W. Bush we hadn’t been all that apt to engage in a war of aggression for a long, long time, either. The film itself is worth seeing, but not great.