Fog of War...(before the second half?)

So I am two posts away from meeting my quota of two posts before an article or movie. Oops. So I will pretend that instead of responding to the part of the movie that we did watch, I am using that first half to discuss what I hope to see in the second half. Semantics, I know. Sorry.

I had a hard time figuring out what I thought of Robert McNamera, since I really don't know all that much about him other than what we watched in the movie, which was clearly biased. My reaction was tainted by the fact that I tend to assume that politicians, especially ones who make decisions about war and the likes are evil, or at least extremely corrupted. While he seemed like a generally nice guy in the movie, I still have my hesitations, since he got to decide what was portrayed about him.

And now for my projection as to where the movie is going, and how it relates to the rest of class: I couldn't help but notice the 9th lesson, which we didn't get to, but which popped up on the screen just as the movie was being turned off: In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil. It seems like McNamera would agree with Walzer and Calhoun that politicians have dirty hands, but that it's necessary. Until this point I think McNamera seemed to try to portray himself as empathetic, understanding, and not evil. But with this lesson that he learned, I wondered, is he trying to justify his actions, knowing that he has committed evils? It made me think of the difference between excuses and justification that I think Calhoun distinguished between. I believe this is an example where he is using an excuse to justify his actions, admitting that he did evil but saying that this evil was necessary, so not really wrong. This seems a bit sketchy to me. McNamera seems to think that he is actually doing good by doing evil. I don't think that an evil being necessary makes it moral, just a little more understandable.