I saw Fog of War for the first time tonight

[ginnyinWI]

Talk about deja vu! The invasion of Iraq is so much like Vietnam. Maybe not so much how we got into war this time compared to that time, which was by degrees, but the way it dragged on and on, with politicians assuring the people with the same catch phrases: we had to defend Vietnam against "tyranny", and we had to win "hearts and minds", and how we were defending ourselves to keep our freedom (huh? our country was in no danger from the VC!) And so it goes. People kill people--it's what they do when they are afraid. And when something isn't working, they just pitch in and do the same thing, only harder.

[Lisa]

1. one of the parts that stunned me was the sequence with the city names

When they're talking about nuclear attacks, and the filmmakers replace the onscreen names of foreign cities with similar-sized US cities. So simple, but yet so devastating -- it really crystallized the madness of the whole idea for me.

And some of the things that they predicted in the movie are coming true, as you say.

[Hissyspit]

2. Very Appropriate Movie for Our Times:

After I saw it, I told a friend of mine to the effect I always thought of Vietnam as a complicated issue, a serious complicated adult concern. Then I a saw this movie and realized it was a bunch of stupid people fucking things up for duplicitous reasons. Sound familiar?

I'm oversimplifying things of course, but it is so much closer to the latter than the former, according to what McNamara and the movie revealed, that I was shocked by that realization.

Highly recommended for anyone who has not seen it.

[ginnyinWI]

4. exactly-- just a bunch of screw-ups

Johnson clearly didn't know what he was doing, and McNamara just followed his president's lead. He's right in saying that had Kennedy not been killed, he would have done everythng possible to keep us out of armed conflict. Without a Vietnam war the whole 60s would have been so different--actually everything that has happened since would have been so different.

[Rapcw]

3. Great movie

I thought it was interesting how McNamara said that if the United States lost, he and Lemay would be charged with war crimes for the bombings of Japanese cities. The part dealing with Vietnam seems so much similar to Iraq it is scary.