In a 2003 documentary film by Errol Morris, former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara notes that all honest military commanders will admit they made mistakes. The film, titled "The Fog of War," is primarily a set of interviews recorded when McNamara was 85 years old.
McNamara spent seven years as Defense Secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations during the Vietnam War. He died six years after the film was released.
The framework for the film is the 11 lessons McNamara had learned about war, and it is within these lessons that he outlines how and why governmental leaders distort war-related information they disseminate to the public.
Part of his defense for this deceit is Lesson No. 9: "In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil."
An issue tied to some military "evil" the American public has witnessed over the past 50-60 years involves the lack of a governmental apology for its deceit and misjudgments about both the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq. Specifically, it is the lack of a specific public apology to the veterans who fought in both wars, and to the families of those veterans.
As the Vietnam War heated up and dragged on in the 1960s and early 1970s, the public was told we were winning, despite the truth that we were not.
In retrospect, McNamara came to believe that American leaders at the time failed to see that the Vietnamese were fighting for independence and the unification of North Vietnam and South Vietnam; instead, our leaders believed we were fighting the spread of communism to all the nations of Southeast Asia and beyond. Big mistake.
About a quarter of a century after the Vietnam War officially ended, American leaders were duped into pursuing war in the Middle East. This time, they thought Iraq either had, or at the very least was developing, weapons of mass destruction. Instead of thoroughly vetting the damning information they had received about the Iraqi weapons program and then sharing the truth with the American people, our leaders once again deceived the public and went headlong into war.
Another big mistake.
Again, young Americans were sent to a distant war and kept there under false pretenses or horrible misjudgments by the military. U.S. combat deaths for this war totaled nearly 4,500, as compared with about 58,000 U.S. combat deaths in the Vietnam War.
In addition to the combat deaths, both the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq caused many noncombat deaths, as well as long-term physical and mental pain and suffering among our returning troops. While some governmental employees most likely thanked these survivors and the survivors of those killed, the U.S. government needs to apologize publicly for lying to them and for using them as pawns.
This Veterans Day would be a good time to do so. Our veterans deserve it.
Bruce Plopper is a journalism professor emeritus in the UALR School of Mass Communication.