The Fog Of War Essay

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The Fog of War is a movie about a former Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, and his tellings of what happened during his time he served and eleven lessons that he created from his mistakes. Although McNamara came up with eleven lessons, there are three that tie in his main idea. McNamara tells his life of being the Secretary of Defense to make people view political leaders as humans that make flaws just like everyone else; his ideas of empathy, proportionality, and the inability to change human nature when it comes to war ties his views together.
One of McNamara major lessons was to empathize with your enemy. What he means by this is that we need to look through our enemies eyes and their thought processes before we do anything. One example …show more content…

There was no proportionality in this situation, little damage was done to us and our punch back was to destroy their country. Not only military lives were taken, but a significant amount of civilian lives as well. McNamara still has the idea dreading on his mind of why it was necessary to drop two atomic bombs on Japan if so much was already destroyed. He compares cities of Japan to major cities in America to give viewers a better idea of how much destruction was done, “Some of the more notable figures are: Tokyo, roughly the size of New York at that time, 51% destroyed; Toyama, the size of Chattanooga, 99% destroyed; Nagoya, the size of Los Angeles, 40% destroyed; Osaka, the size of Chicago, 35% destroyed, all of which was done before dropping the nuclear bombs.” Looking at these numbers, Japan was basically wiped out after the U.S. dropped those atomic bombs. McNamara even explains that he was afraid that the U.S. would be charged as war criminals if they had not won. He believed that they were very over-destructive and showed no mercy toward civilians. Proportionality is key when fighting other countries, we should always take into consideration what damage was done to us before we

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