| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 246 words from this article are provided below; about 713 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

The Fog of War. Directed by Errol Morris; produced by Errol Morris, Michael Williams, and Julie Ahlberg. 2003; color; 107 minutes. Distributed by Sony Pictures Classic.
In a taped telephone conversation in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson asked Robert McNamara, whither Washington's mission in Vietnam? The secretary of defense admitted that "The frank answer is we don't know what is going on out there." That exchange, reproduced in Errol Morris's Academy Award-winning documentary, The Fog of War, underlines the film's message: for all its statistics, all its strategic planning, all its economic and military power, not only could Washington not master Vietnam, it could not see it.	1
What makes The Fog of War a stunning historical work is not its vivid retrospect of a "great man's" life but how it implicitly emplots that life within a longer and wider world history of the failures of applying social science in international relations, of imperial interventions self-justified as civilizing missions. Its excavation of the religiosity of reason, of the messianic devotion to "rational" knowledge, recalls Carl Becker's still-magnificent essay The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932) for its close analysis of the evangelical fundamentalism that has characterized secular thought in the West since the Enlightenment. Absolutist faith in ethnocentric models has repeatedly led to perfectionist crusades that fail to question the methodological presuppositions that determine policies of devastating social consequences, until it is too late.	. . .

There are about 713 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.