Regards all.
Pasha
Denis Healey, former UK defence secretary, asks if The Fog of War does justice to his US counterpart
Friday March 26, 2004
The Guardian
The Fog of War is an attempt to cover the career of Robert McNamara as US defense secretary in 107 minutes. I found the film disappointing, since it fails to cover either the brilliance of his mind or the complexity of his personality. It portrays him as both stilted and confusing, which he never was in real life. McNamara's own account in his memoir, In Retrospect, is far superior. As the great historian Arthur Schlesinger said: "It is brave, honest, honourable and altogether compelling."
McNamara was the able president of the Ford Motor Company when he was picked by President Kennedy to serve as his secretary of defense, just in time to deal with the Cuban missile crisis in which Khrushchev removed his nuclear missiles from Cuba and, in return, Kennedy removed his Jupiter and Thor missiles from Europe. McNamara was convinced that no American president would ever actually authorise the use of nuclear weapons unless the US was under direct attack, and was deeply worried that Britain or France might try to trigger a thermonuclear holocaust by using their nuclear weapons first.
This led to NATO adopting a policy of "flexible response" that envisaged the limited use of nuclear weapons against particular targets. However, this policy was never used in practise - the mere existence of nuclear weapons was sufficient to deter aggression.
The British defence ministry had already begun to adopt a range of planning, programming and budgeting techniques developed in the US by McNamara - which I carried further in several areas, since they were invaluable in my running battles with the Treasury. I always worked closely with McNamara, although he announced the cancellation of the Skybolt ballistic missile at London Airport without telling Macmillan in advance. A few weeks later, Kennedy offered Britain the Polaris intercontinental missile instead, without consulting any of his other allies - thus giving De Gaulle the excuse he wanted to veto Britain's entry into the Common Market.
His greatest weaknesses were his passion for numbers and his belief that wars could be won by bombing alone. We used to have breakfast together in Brussels before every meeting of NATO defence ministers. I once asked him how things were going in Vietnam. "Just fine," he replied. "Next month we'll be dropping twice the tonnage of bombs we are dropping this month."
In fact, the excessive use of bombers in Vietnam turned the whole of the local population against the west. At exactly the same period, when Britain was engaged in the "war of confrontation" against Indonesia, I refused to let the RAF drop a single bomb from an aircraft, relying wholly on fighting in the Borneo jungles with Gurkhas and our Special Forces - the SAS and SBS.
As a result, whereas millions of civilians were killed in Vietnam, and America lost the war there, in Borneo Britain won the war with fewer casualties than on the roads over a Bank Holiday weekend - probably the reason why in Britain nobody now remembers the war of confrontation, while Americans will never forget Vietnam.
emphasis is all mine. Shoddy editing by me: I stand before you corrected, humbled and chastised, and am currently whipping myself like a frenzied Shi'ite 
Anybody who can walk around like that (and in full public view) without feeling the need for some kind of 'maintenance' has a lot going for him. Poise, assurance - you name it 
Good luck on getting the interview. I read a cracking article a few years back describing a meeting of Heath, Powell and Benn over lunch and statesmen like that seem to be a rare thing these days. I think Healey is of that ilk. As I've said before, when ideology and principle have gone from politics, all that's left is ambition. 
