The Fog of warThe first depressing take-away from the movie is that our intelligence efforts are almost worthless. The CIA assured JFK that the Russians did not have nuclear warheads in Cuba at the time of the crisis. The missiles were in place and the warheads on their way. In fact it seems that the warheads were already in Cuba at the time of the dispute. Not only that but Fidel Castro met McNamara face-to-face in the 1990s and said that he'd recommended to the Russians that they use them even though he knew that Cuba would be destroyed and all of its citizens killed. (N.B.: Personal ownership of a third-world country is a beautiful thing!)
The second conclusion from watching the film is that the U.S. has never won the hearts and minds of foreigners or even succeeded in changing foreigners' minds. We won WWII by using our industrial power to destroy the capacity of the Japanese and Germans to carry out their objectives, not by convincing the Japanese or the Germans of anything or changing their minds or objectives.
[From Phillip Greenspun, Thanks Omar!]
Imagine that a leader so humanitarian that didn't care whether or not his people were destroyed. The second comment is simply not true. The US has many friends all over the world (only comparable to France). I can't tell you how many foreigners (especially from Eastern Europe) I have seen using, somewhat tacky, checks with an american flag on it.
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