As is usual with British television, most of the best films and documentaries and driven into the wee small hours by the soap operas and fly-on-the-wall docu-dramas, gardening programs, house make-over shows and Z-list celebrity challenges.
So yesterday was no different, and because of the popularist scheduling, the premiere of The Fog of War was pushed back to ten at night.Rather than the regular film style, this film instead was from the same stable as
Fahrenheit 911, albeit slightly differently as the basis of this particular extended documentary was the retelling of a slice of American history from the point of view of a
Robert Strange McNamara, a man of Irish stock who has lived a truly fascinating and eventful life.
Now, I didn't get to see all of the film, but for those who prefer some cerebral edification every now & then, I couldn't recommend this film more highly.
In this film, you're invited into an oddly voyeuristic journey into the recent past through the eyes of man who I consider to be a great objective viewer and thinker.
I'll spare you any kind of potted biography, much of that you can find for yourself, but what is worth mentioning at this point is his role during the 2nd World War.
He was essentially a statistical analyst, and as such, he was charged with making the American military war machine more efficient.
In doing so, through the power of numbers -- which was so graphically illustrated in the film -- he indirectly recommended the near total destruction of literally every major city in Japan, and latterly, the use of the infant atom bomb.
By his own admission -- he and the military hierarchy above him -- were, for all intents and purposes, war criminals.
Now, this got me thinking. We look at the likes of
Saddam Hussein, and we see someone who is clearly a war criminal because of his actions not only against his enemies and his neighbours, but also certain sections of his own populous.
The list of these so-called war criminals goes on and on and on. Most recently hitting the headlines, we now have
Robert Mugabe committing acts of untold violence against his own people.
But then I'm reminded of a saying that in many ways has become somewhat of a truism; to the victor, the spoils of war.
And inside that kernel of new truth, we see that those who win are often beyond reproach. And that we ourselves justify their actions by our complicity in those actions. After all, can we attach a price to freedom?
Now I'm just going to come out and say it, but I think that we have already entered into the first stages of a 3rd World War.
So the obvious question is, what do I know?
Well it's pretty simple, and hidden amongst the rhetoric being echoed from America to Europe and across the whole of the Middle East is the truth.
The politicians talk of a war on terror, and they're actually right for a change.
And the interesting thing is, the Americans were probably the first victim of this when they were driven from Vietnam. There you had not just a war of ideologies, but a war of strategies.
On the one hand, you had young conscripts and veterans alike being sent to fight a conventional war somewhere in Asia. To fight a war with access to a near limitless supply of weapons, field equipment, armourment and ammunition.
While on the other side, you had a poorly armed populous of people who knew nothing of admitting defeat, who knew nothing of being demoralized or of being ashamed. Who knew the terrain intimately and who knew how to survive on meager resources and to fight a war of attrition.
In essence, they were everything the Americans were not.
Fast forward to the present day, and we see that the conflict in Vietnam was a template for a style of conflict that has been used many, many times over since.
After the 2nd World War, the military hierarchy in Britain wanted to disband the Special Air Service. The belief was that such a focused fighting force simply wasn't relevant anymore.
In 1984
the Libyan embassy siege came to a close in dramatic style when the SAS stormed the building. For the first time, the world got a glimpse of the way in which we were to respond to the new enemy.
Gone are the days of mighty forces lurching towards one another like drunken ogres, tearing fields and mountains with their rain of fire.
We will now see highly-focused campaigns being fought out in living rooms across the world. The new war is a war on terror, and the news media will be the delivery mechanism of this new payload. And prize is the defeat of one ideology by another.
No one could see the beginning of this war because no one nation drew a line in the side.
No one people were affronted by another race or creed.
No one border was overrun by armed forces.
No one person could truly comprehend the scale and scope of this new war.
This is a war that transcends racial differences, that is blind to boundaries and regions and that will ultimately include every one of us to a greater and lesser degree.
This war began decades ago, and both sides have already suffered considerable losses...
