’The Fog of War’ and ’Preventive War’

Ounce of Preventive War, Pound of Destruction

Notion of ’strike first’ helped fill the 20th century
with violence

By Errol Morris,

<http://www.latimes.com/news/printed...>

Errol Morris’ documentaries include "The Gates of
Heaven" and "The Thin Blue Line." "The Fog of War" opens
in Los Angeles and New York City today.

In the spring of 2001, I started interviewing Robert
McNamara, the secretary of Defense under presidents
Kennedy and Johnson, for the film "The Fog of War." I
have often been asked: "Why McNamara? Why make a movie
about this man, a man reviled by many as the architect
of the Vietnam War?" Because I had read McNamara’s "In
Retrospect" in 1995 and was surprised that the book I
read was different from the mea culpa that was described
in countless reviews and editorials.

The book wasn’t an apology but an anguished attempt to
look back on history and to imagine whether history
could have been different. At its heart, it also raised
these questions: "Can we learn from experience? Can we
learn from history?"

McNamara’s earliest memory is of Armistice Day, 1918. "I
was 2 years old," McNamara says in the film. "You may
not believe I have the memory, but I do. I remember the
tops of the streetcars being crowded with human beings
cheering and kissing and screaming - end of World War I,
we won - but also celebrating the belief of many
Americans, particularly Woodrow Wilson, [that] we’d
fought a war to end all wars."

What I find so interesting about this is that it is a
memory of "preventive war." This becomes one of the
central ironies of the film. The war that was fought to
end war ushered in the 20th century, the century of the
worst carnage in human history. Far from ending future
war, World War I engendered war.

Now that the concept of "preventive war" has entered the
vocabulary again in the context of the latest war in
Iraq, it is interesting to note that it has been a
recurring theme through the last century.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, preventive war was
seriously discussed because of the advent of nuclear
weapons. It was argued that because the United States
had nuclear superiority, we would be well advised to
fight the Soviets sooner rather than later, before they
could match our nuclear arsenal.

One of the advocates of this policy was Curtis LeMay,
the Air Force general under whom McNamara served during
World War II. In 1957, LeMay was head of the Strategic
Air Command. He was warned that few SAC bombers could
survive a surprise Soviet attack, and the men who told
him the news remember his response: "I’ll knock [them
out] before they get off the ground. It’s not national
policy, but it’s my policy."

And it was LeMay who essentially advocated preventive
war during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Everyone is familiar with the tape recordings Nixon made
in the White House, but it’s less well known that both
Kennedy and Johnson selectively recorded phone
conversations and Cabinet meetings. In one recording
made during the missile crisis, LeMay (by then Air Force
chief of staff) comes across as angry and bellicose. He
tells Kennedy that what Kennedy is doing - forgoing
immediate military action in hopes of negotiating a
settlement - is worse than Munich; that is, worse than
the way British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave
in to Hitler and set up World War II. Essentially, LeMay
calls Kennedy an appeaser, a weakling. And LeMay never
backed down. In a story that McNamara tells, after the
Cuban Missile Crisis is resolved, Kennedy compliments
his generals on having "won" by keeping the nation out
of war. LeMay blurts out, "Won, hell, we lost. We should
go in and wipe them out today!"

Such stories are particularly instructive because of new
information that has come to light in recent years. In
1962, the CIA told Kennedy and his advisors that there
were no nuclear warheads in Cuba. It was wrong. In fact,
there were 162 nuclear warheads on the island that could
have been used against an American invasion force and
the U.S. homeland.

LeMay’s belief that it was important to strike then - to
fight a preventive war when the odds were supposedly
with us - would have in all likelihood led to disaster.
It could have led to a nuclear exchange between the U.S.
and the Soviet Union. Someone recently said to me,
"Well, the Cuban Missile Crisis was not that important."
I replied, "It depends on how important you think
Florida is."

So here we are, at the beginning of a new century, and
preventive war has made a comeback. I look at it with a
jaundiced eye. Haven’t we been there before? Isn’t
"preventive war" an oxymoron? Shouldn’t we have learned
by now that war doesn’t reduce hostility, anger and
instability but instead creates more of the same? And we
might ask ourselves: Do we want more of the same for
this next century?