March 5, 2004
There is a remarkable moment in "Fog of War" when Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and architect of the Viet Nam War, states that the U.S. should never enter a war without the support and assistance of it's allies.
Everybody knows that for all the window-dressing applied to the support of Great Britain and Poland and a few other states, the U.S. entered Iraq not only without the active support of most of its allies, but with their active opposition.
It's a hard lesson to learn.
But then, the point of "Fog of War" is that every assumption has to be re-examined in the light of experience and new information. Robert McNamara has more experience than most. I'm not sure what he'd make of the Iraq war. He might observe that another piece of wisdom America should have learned by now is that when the reasons given for military action prove to be invalid, instead of finding new reasons, find new actions.
If Bush had said right from the beginning that the U.S. would now be the world's marshal, patrolling countries near and far, saving citizens from the abusive practices of dictators and bullies, and building democracies where none existed before, we might be able to have an honest and interesting debate about how it should be done, and or even whether it should be done. We could talk about whether the United Nations should play a part, or not, and whether the U.S., like Gary Cooper, should walk down Main Street alone at High Noon,