"In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil."

These words come from Robert McNamara, former president of Ford Motor Company, Secretary of Defense, and president of the World Bank. Whenever we watch the documentary of McNamara's career, The Fog of War, EC shakes her head when McNamara makes this statement. The Fog of War ranks as one of my favorite movies, of any genre or time period. It's a simple film: Documentarian Errol Morris simply asks McNamara to reflect on his life, and explain the lessons he's learned. McNamara comes up with 11:

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 both often 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.

These sound like pithy, almost trite statements (practically from some MBA program), but taken in the context of the film and the background McNamara provides, each is powerful and has left a lasting impression on my mind. I don't agree with every conclusion, but the questions posed by such a towering figure of the 20th century cause me to reflect deeply on the lessons offered, especially as they relate to politics -- not "politics" as in running for office, but the old, "classical" definition: The common deliberation of how to best use public resources in order to achieve the good life.

The most startling of McNamara's lessons is number 9. (The most useful is number 1, but that's for another blog). McNamara was intimately involved in the eventual use of using incendiary bombs dropped by low-flying B-17s on Japanese cities during WWII.

Some argue the decisively destructive impact of this tactic on civilian populations sealed the victory for the Allied powers, sparing the U.S. the necessity of a D-Day-like land invasion of Japan, which would have cost thousands of American lives. Others argue it was an unnecessary and breathtakingly cruel crime of war. So McNamara poses the question: "How much evil must we do in order to do good?"

All of this came to mind last week when I saw an analysis by Anthony H. Cordesman, an influential but relatively unknown fellow in Washington. Cordesman lays out various plausible scenarios regarding conflict in the Middle East - specifically, a nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran. Some of Cordesman's conclusions of the possible devastation, summarized well here, include:

• 16 million to 28 million Iranians dead within 21 days, and between 200,000 and 800,000 Israelis dead within the same time frame.
  
• Israel would need to keep a "reserve strike capability to ensure no other power can capitalize on Iranian strike."
  
• This means Israel would have to target "key Arab neighbors" -- in particular Syria and Egypt.
  
• Israel's options include a limited nuclear strike on the region . A full-scale Israeli attack on Syria would kill up to 18 million people within 21 days, making Syrian recovery impossible.
  
• A Syrian attack with all its reputed chemical and biological warfare assets could kill up to 800,000 Israelis, but Israeli society would recover.
• An Israeli attack on Egypt would likely strike at the main population centers, with a death toll likely in the tens of millions. A strike would destroy the Suez Canal and almost certainly destroy the Aswan dam, sending monstrous floods down the Nile to sweep away the glowing rubble. It would mean the end of Egypt as a functioning society.

An Iran-Israel nuclear exchange is only one of 11 plausible scenarios envisioned by Cordesman in the decade of 2010-2020 -- but the potential consequences of such a 2-3 week tit-for-tat would be fantastically devastating. As Cordesman telling states, "The only way to win is not to play." For all the cavalier rhetoric emanating from Tehran, Washington and Tel Aviv, Cordesman's scenarios should inspire sober meditation on the 11 lessons of Robert McNamara.

BC