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:: 11.20.2003 ::
Errol Morris' "The Fog of War": a film for our times
You can watch the preview on Apple's website, and you can read a review of it here. Excerpt: The United States's most fundamental mistake in Vietnam — which McNamara analyzes accurately — was to misunderstand the ambitions of the Vietnamese people. To American cold warriors, Vietnam looked like a victim of outside communist subversion. It seemed natural that the people there would welcome our version of freedom, but we misunderstood the degree to which communism was a vehicle for Vietnamese nationalism and we had not grappled with the relatively new phenomenon of decolonization. Our efforts to stop Vietnam's national aspirations and impose our own despotic dictators only hurt our standing among the people we claimed we were saving.
Similarly, our leaders have foolishly assumed that Iraqis would welcome U.S. and British troops as liberators because of what we see as our essential goodness. We fail to empathize with the Iraqis — to recognize that our troops' occupation of their country looks different to an Iraqi than it does to us. We fail to see our own ambiguous history in world affairs and the causes we have given for Arab resentment. As long as we continue to blame Iraqi turmoil on sabotage by a few Saddam Hussein loyalists and not recognize the nationalist anger that we are provoking, we will let ourselves in for the same lasting anguish that we experienced because of our leaders' miscalculations 40 years ago. You can also check out the film's Flash website here. In theaters Dec. 19th.
:: Deb 3:41 PM :: permalink ::
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