Fog of War discussion

After the classroom discussion and the talks on the various different angles that can and have been taken with this highly controversial documentary, I am concentrating my focus on two models: The first is from Thompson's "Moral Responsibility of Public Officals: The Problem of Dirty Hands" On page 905, Thompson states "The criteria for personal responsibilty I adopt are common to a wide range of moral theories: they hold us responsible for outcomes insofar as we cause them and do not act in ignorance or under compulsion. On these criteria we can say that one offical is more or less responsible than another offical without implying, as in the law, that degrees of fault correspond to proportinate shares of compensation or match the standard categories of criminal liability." I think McNamara is showing signs of this model because he admits that he does have some blame with the actions of war, but ultimately, it was the president who was really at fault, which shows us the hierachical model. Under Thompson's model above, I feel that McNamara is following this model because he says that neither of them could persuade the other to think and act in a different manner, thus that was when he was fired from his position as secretary of defense. But I also think he follows Shue's justification model, because he is more or less providing excuses as to why he did what he did. I think that both him and Johnson are guilty of war crimes and I think he also believes this because of the comment about that if they had not won the war, they could of been charged with war crimes, and when he made the reference to the International Court, which the United States is not a member of. If we were members, I don't think that our politican's would be so quick to jump to war, I think that they might delay their actions because of the chance of having the International Court charging them with war crimes.

I honestly think that McNamara did the documentary because it is his way to justify to the people why he did what he did, because I think he feels responsible for some of the loss of lives that he is partly responsible for. I think that he did this because he has a guilty consciousness for the war and possibly did this to clear his consciousness before his time to depart from this world. I think it was his way to clear his name and to accept some of the responsibilty, and to seek forgiveness.