Directed by Errol Morris and released in December, 2003, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, consists of interviews with former United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, detailing his life and the difficult decisions that he made during his career. The term "fog of war" refers to the uncertainty that descends over a battlefield once fighting begins.
Morris interviewed McNamara for over twenty hours, editing down the footage into a two-hour film. The concept of structuring the film as 11 lessons comes from McNamara's 1996 book In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. Morris creates the film's 11 lessons from various statements that McNamara uses throughout the interview. The lessons lend structure to The Fog of War, but they are not explicitly McNamara's. (At the aforementioned UC Berkeley event, McNamara contended that he did not agree with Morris's interpretations in all respects.) After the completion of the film, McNamara responded to Morris by complementing the film's eleven lessons with ten more lessons of his own; these are included in the film's DVD release.

When, at the Berkeley event, McNamara was asked to apply the lessons from his 1996 book to the US invasion of Iraq, he refused, arguing that former Secretaries of Defense should not comment on the policy of the current Secretary. McNamara suggested that other people were welcome to apply his lessons to Iraq if they wanted to, but that he would not explicitly do it, and noted that his lessons were more general than any particular military conflict.

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