Lessons not yet lernt

The Fog of War

finally watched this documentary. excellent lessons for the country, but also ourselves in our personal / professional spheres.

The Lessons:

#1 Empathize with your enemy.

#2 Rationality will not save us.

#3 There's something beyond one's self.

#4 Maximize efficiency.

#5 Proportionality should be a guideline in war.

#6 Get the data.

#7 Belief and seeing are both often wrong.

#8 Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.

#9 In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.

#10 Never say never.

#11 You can't change human nature.


Other Quotes:
"don't answer the question that was asked. answer the question that you wish was asked."

"it isn't that we aren't rational. we are rational. but reason has limits."

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." -TS Eliot


and


"what makes us omniscient? have we a record of omniscience? we are the strongest nation in the world today. i do not believe that we should ever apply that economic, political, and military power unilaterally. if we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there. none of our allies supported us. not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. if we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning."


These lessons and quotes are from the movie. Below are Robert S McNamara's Ten Lessons. His book: Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century.

Ten Lessons:

#1 The human race will not eliminate war in this century, but we can reduce the brutality of war - the level of killing by adhearing to the principles of a "Just War", in particular to the principle of "proportionality."

#2 The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.

#3 We are the most powerful nation in the world - economically, politically and militaritly - and we are likely to remain so for decades ahead. But we are not omniscient.

If we cannot persuade other nations with similar interests and similar values of the merits of our proposed use of that power, we should not proceed unilaterally except in the unlikely requirement to defend direclty the continental US, Alaska and Hawaii.

#4 Moral principles are often ambiguous guides to foreign policy and defense policy, but surely we can agree that we should establish as a major goal of US foreign policy and, indeed, of foreign policies across the glove: the avoidance in this century of the carnage - 160 million dead - caused by conflict in the 20th century.

#5 We, the riches nation in the world, have failed in our responsibility to our own poor and to the disadvantaged across the world to help them advance their welfare in the most fundamental terms of nutrition, literacy, health and employment.

#6 Corporate executives must recoginze there is no contradiction between a soft heart and a hard head. Of course, they have reponsibilities to stockholders, but they also have responsibilities to their employees, their customers and to socieity as a whole.

#7 President Kennedy believed a primary responsibility of a president - indeed "the" primary responsibility of a president - is to keep the nation out of war, if at all possible.

#8 War is a blunt instrument by which to settle disputes between or within nations, and economic sanctions are rarely effective. Therefore, we should build a system of jurisprudence based on the Internation Court - that the US has refused to support - which would hold individuals responsible for crimes against humanity.

[Related -- Listened to Today: A Nuremberg Prosecutor's Story Related site: Benjamin B. Ferencz Law. Not War.]

#9 If we are to deal effectively with terrorists across the globe, we must develop a sense of empathy - I don't mean "sympathy," but rather "understanding" - to counter their attachks on us and the Western World.

#10 One of the greatest dangers we face today is the risk that terrorists will obtain access to weapons of mass destruction as a result of the breakdown of the Non-Proliferation Regime. We in the US are contributing to that breakdown.