"We know Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction: We have the receipts."
Why We Fight would make a hell of a double feature with Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. The new film from Eugene Jarecki, director of The Trials of Henry Kissinger, plays like a quiet storm. It marshals its arguments so smoothly, so deliberately, that when the film finally reaches its crescendo you're blown away. Think of Isaac Hayes covering "Walk on By," and you'll have an sense of this documentary's power.
Reaching all the way back to the admonitions in Dwight D Eisenhower's prescient farewell address, Why We Fight examines how and why the United States has moved to a state of near-permanent war and who stands to benefit; namely, the military-industrial complex. Against archival footage of DDE and recent footage from the Iraqi street, the film talks to everyone from Richard Perle to Gore Vidal to John McCain and Chalmers Johnson. Kids at parades, retired Pentagon officials, and the father of a 9/11 victim are all asked why we fight. Even the pilots who made the first bombing runs on Baghdad are interviewed. The most popular answer to this question is "freedom," which is the fluid ideal invoked by every president since DDE to explain the United States's preemptive incursions into other countries. But freedom to do what, and for whom?
"Today's demon is yesterday's friend," someone observes, but it's more complicated than that. Why We Fight makes the case that the United States as the lone world superpower engages in systematic economic colonialism, spurred by manufactured leaps into conflicts that support its predeveloped foreign policy initiatives. For example, Iraq.
By September 12, 2001, in a televised address, George W. Bush had already introduced the notion of war with Iraq, something that'd been on the Project for a New American Century's "to-do" list for ages. Lest we forget, the United States helped install Saddam Hussein in Iraq after the Shah was overthrown in neighboring Iran, thus imperiling U.S. oil interests in the region. But when Hussein the puppet, pictured shaking hands with Rumsfeld in archival footage, decided to stop playing ball, he had to be demonized to get at those oil reserves. So noble goals like the liberation of the Iraqi people were bandied about, and vague suggestions were advanced that Saddam played a role in the 9/11 attacks, all in order to manipulate public opinion and create willingness among the American people to go to war. Who could be against freedom?
Congress continues to bend to this "will" of the people because defense spending means jobs and jobs mean reelection. The military and its outside contractors, like Raytheon and Halliburton, are invested in keeping the United States buying weapons, as footage from an armaments trade show makes clear. With every new product, they overestimate its ability, lowball its cost, and flood congressional districts with manufacturing jobs. Parts of the B-52 are manufactured in almost every state. What legislator is going to take a stand against that? If you do the cost-benefit analysis, war is profitable.
But the legislators aren't even the ones making the decisions anymore, the film argues. Think tanks, unelected and accountable to no one, are the shadowy arm of the military-industrial complex. They develop foreign policy ideas and cite intelligence out of context to back their claims.
Even now, the U.S. still has no exit strategy for Iraq. Maybe the plan never was to leave. Private contractors fight alongside an all-volunteer army of the working class. Bases are being built, and Halliburton and other outsourcers are settling in. John McCain observes on camera that the American people essentially elected a goverment contractor as vice president. Could U.S. foreign policy be "We want our companies to get rich in your country?"
Why We Fight sticks mostly to the big dogs, those who wield power in all branches of government and business, to examine U.S. foreign policy, but some of the film's most powerful moments come from the NYPD officer who lost his son in the World Trade Center. A Vietnam vet and a civil servant, he wants revenge or at least a way to memorialize his child. The means he arrives at--having his son's name written on one of the bombs dropped on Iraq--may seem shocking or distasteful to some. After it's deployed, however, another bomb is dropped: The president announces that there is no evidence tying Iraq to 9/11. The cop's world falls apart a second time, but now the scales have dropped from his eyes: "What the hell are we there for? The government exploited my feeling of patriotism and my deep desire for revenge. I was willing to believe anything."
Thank god Eugene Jarecki wasn't. As the credits* rolled under Belle and Sebastian's "I Fought in a War" [a song the cinetrix will never again dismiss as twee], the Full Frame audience gave him a standing ovation.
*Fun fact: Kenny Shopsin is thanked.
