Film Review: Why We Fight (dir. E. Jarecki, 2005)

This film is much more than just another "lefty" anti-war documentary (but it is that). The director, Eugene Jarecki, is actually interested here in telling us a number of stories. One story is about intelligence and the build-up to the Iraq War, but another story is about an ordinary guy who lost his son on 9/11, and a third story is about a troubled young man who joins the Army after 9/11. Still another story is about a woman who emigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam as a fifteen year-old in 1975 and now works in a bomb factory. Perhaps the most anti-war of the stories is that of the stealth bomber pilots who dropped the bombs in the so-called decapitation strike that began "Operation Iraqi Freedom."

Somehow, Jarecki manages to weave these stories together in a narrative about what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. Going in, I was concerned that the film might make the too-easy conspiracy theory argument that the U.S. fights wars because of war profiteering by major corporations. Instead, the film makes a more subtle argument, that since the end of the Second World War the U.S. has become a militarized and militaristic society; that the military-industrial-congressional-ideological complex (Jarecki includes think tanks in the complex, which I think is right; today, the production of militaristic ideas is more important than the manufacture of bombs) has come to dominate American policy in ways that earlier generations of Americans would have found troubling, to say the least.

I liked the framing of this argument with Eisenhower, a career military man. Eisenhower saw what was happening at the time, in this narrative, but the tenor of the times (the 1950s) made his cautionary warnings rather moot. As the better half points out, Ike's warnings against the military-industrial complex in his fareweel address to the Nation sound as naive today as those of the Anti-Federalists against a standing army.

This film is definitely worth watching, if/when it comes to your town, or on DVD. It's much, much better than Fahrenheit 9/11, which I liked, btw.