I mentioned the movie The Fog of War a few posts back in reference to the death of Robert McNamara. I really believe this is an incredibly important movie. I just now found the trailer on YouTube:

I post this for two reasons: 1) It features my great uncle. 2) It is a superb video edited in a way that makes what normally would be a pretty boring subject actually interesting. The tiny moments of odd humanity shown in these old people are poignant.

In July 2006 I wrote this, which accurately predicted this.

I love it when I'm right! Awesome!

Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, primary architect of the Vietnam War, and president of the World Bank for many years, died today. This is probably unremarkable for many people, but this man played an incredibly significant role in the development of many American and world events.

I originally came to learn of the importance of Robert McNamara through Errol Morris' 2003 documentary The Fog of War. This is a powerful movie based entirely on 20 hours of interviews with an 85 year-old McNamara by Morris. He uses a camera technique that makes it feel like McNamara is talking directly to you. In this film, McNamara expounds upon eleven lessons he has learned in his life, most having to do with war and human nature. He is a deeply thoughtful and introspective man whose touching humanity may surprise you.

Here are the eleven 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 often both 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

Later, McNamara created ten additional 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 adhering to the principles of a "Just War," in particular to the principle of "proportionality."
2. The indefinite combinations 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 militarily—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 the proposed use of that power, we should not proceed unilaterally except in the unlikely requirement to defend directly the continental U.S., 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 U.S. foreign policy and, indeed, of foreign policy across the globe: the avoidance, in this century of the carnage—160 million dead—caused by conflict in the 20th century.
5. We, the richest 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 recognize there is no contradiction between a soft heart and a hard head. Of course, they have responsibilities to stockholders, but they also have responsibilities to their employees, their customers and to society 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 International Court—that the U.S. has refused to support—which would hold individuals responsible for crimes against humanity.
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 attacks 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 U.S. are contributing to that breakdown.

And then he produced eleven lessons from the Vietnam War:

1. We misjudged then — and we have since — the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.
2. We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience … We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.
3. We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
4. Our judgments of friend and foe, alike, reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
5. We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrine.
6. We failed, as well, to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
7. We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.
8. After the action got under way, and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening, and why we were doing what we did.
9. We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
10. We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
11. We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.

Underlying many of these errors lay our failure to organize the top echelons of the executive branch to deal effectively with the extraordinarily complex range of political and military issues.

On Monday I will be taking off towards Africa to work in Kigali, Rwanda, for six weeks.

Keep up with the team blog here.

Thank you for all of your support!

Two weekends ago I preached a sermon in which I claimed that institutional Christianity has received a very large "F" from the world, largely for the way it has gone about engaging the world. Thus, institutional Christianity, especially conservative Evangelicalism, has ended up doing little more than arousing suspicion and making itself look ridiculous. The following video is a brilliant explanation of exactly what has happened.



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Sometimes I'm affected by situations that I am totally unconnected with and should otherwise regard as just another news story in the world.

I first saw on someone's Facebook status yesterday that a recent graduate of Harding University, whom her daughter knew, had been killed by her husband in Memphis and dumped in a nearby river. This morning I received an email from the Christian Chronicle with a news update on the situation. It was basically just facts about her being reported missing by her husband, who then eventually led police to the riverbank where he had dumped her body.

I have no idea who these people are, but the story does have some quotes from others describing this young woman. She apparently was a wonderful, vivacious person. She had done nursing school at Harding so she was obviously ambitious and driven. There was also a mention that she had recently cut her long hair short to give to the Locks of Love charity, which provides natural hair wigs to children who have lost their hair due to cancer treatments.

But here she is, dead, murdered by a man she obviously trusted enough to dedicate her life to. As I sometimes do, I plugged her name into Facebook, and up popped her profile pic, which - sure enough - was her standing there with a huge smile, holding up her long swath of freshly cut hair. Looking perfectly happy, perfectly normal. By all appearances and accounts, she seemed to be living what most would consider a beautiful life.

But obviously something dark and evil was lurking. Something so evil that it would leave her murdered body at the bottom of a river. I obviously know next to nothing about this whole story, but it starkly reminds me that we simply cannot make assumptions about people and the lives they are living. Seemingly perfect people can have hidden darkness lurking around them, while others who you would never let your kids around turn out to be angels from God.

The whole story of the Church of Christ preacher and his wife in Tennessee was a heavy reminder of this as well. To their church, they were a lovely young family, while at home he was psychologically abusing her to the point she felt justified blowing him away with a shotgun.

So, let's just remind ourselves constantly that appearances matter little. Let's get to the heart of lives around us and be transparent with our own, even if we feel it leaves us looking a little bit like damaged goods. We're all damaged goods, get over it.