The Fog of War - Wikipedia - 0 views
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Lesson #1: Empathize with your enemy.
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McNamara emphasizes that it was luck that prevented nuclear war—rational individuals like Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro came close to destroying themselves and each other.
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McNamara talks about the proportions of cities destroyed in Japan by the US before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, comparing the destroyed Japanese cities to similarly-sized cities in the US: Tokyo, roughly the size of New York City, was 51% destroyed; Toyama, the size of Chattanooga, was 99% destroyed; Nagoya, the size of Los Angeles, was 40% destroyed; Osaka, the size of Chicago, was 35% destroyed; Kobe, the size of Baltimore, was 55% destroyed; etc. He says LeMay once said that, had the United States lost the war, they would have been tried for war crimes, and agrees with this assessment.
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Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong. McNamara affirms Morris' framing of lesson 7 in relation to the Gulf of Tonkin incident: "We see what we want to believe."
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Lesson #8: Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. McNamara says that, even though the United States is the strongest nation in the world, it should never use that power unilaterally: "if we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we better reexamine our reasoning."
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we are not omniscient. If we cannot persuade other nations with similar interests and similar values of the merits of the proposed use of that power, we should not proceed unilaterally except in the unlikely requirement to defend directly the continental U.S., Alaska and Hawaii.
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We, the richest nation in the world, have failed in our responsibility to our own poor and to the disadvantaged across the world to help them advance their welfare in the most fundamental terms of nutrition, literacy, health and employment.
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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.
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If we are to deal effectively with terrorists across the globe, we must develop a sense of empathy—I don't mean "sympathy," but rather "understanding"—to counter their attacks on us and the Western World.
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We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
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Our misjudgments of friend and foe, alike, reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
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We failed then—and have since—to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrine. We failed, as well, to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
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We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
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We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.