Why We Fight
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Movie Reviews of Why We Fight
Movie Review: IKE'S FAREWELL WARNING RE-EMERGES AS TIMELY PROPHECY
Summary: 5 Stars
A new documentary film that won the 2005 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival now in nationwide release features a warning from this nation's 34th president about the unwarranted influence on U.S. foreign policy from the nation's numerous military contractors and is gaining praise from civil libertarians across the nation as that influence on world affairs is still obvious to all of us in today's times.
The film is called `Why We Fight,' a title the documentary filmmaker took from a series of World War 2 propaganda films made by Frank Capra. It opens with the January 17, 1961 farewell address to the country by President Dwight Eisenhower who was about to turn over the keys to the White House to a young newcomer named John Kennedy.
The remarks made by the outgoing chief executive from the Oval Office was the last talk to the nation by the one time five-star Army general before returning to private life. What's interesting in the speech is the candor he exhibited about what he believed to be the growing cozy relationship between military suppliers and those politicians in Congress who liked to keep the constituents in their districts happy with large contracts for the making of weapons and supplies. That, in turn, would keep those contractors and the leaders in the military pleased because they would keep getting improved weapons to counter the growing Cold War threat they believed they faced from the Soviet Union.
The phrase Ike used, `the military-industrial complex,' has since become synonymous with the growing influence by military weapon suppliers on eager politicians wanting campaign donations for their coffers and jobs for their districts and the eagerness of those politicians to keep purchasing more and more weapons from these same suppliers.
It's obvious the World War 2 hero who commanded the Allied military invasion of Europe that defeated Nazism knew what he was talking about when he warned his fellow citizens that `we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.' Unfortunately, for us citizens who believe a rising police state has developed in the four decades since.
Eisenhower is considered by many of today's historians as an amiable military dunce who only knew how to operate in an Army setting so let the political experts in his administration make the decisions to run this country in his eight years in office in a similar fashion to that of a highly successful corporate CEO letting his underlings run the show while he spends most of his time visiting stockholders in cheerleading sessions to keep their stock value high. But it's now apparent that he was much shrewder than originally believed in his dealings with Congress and the military bureaucracy he found in Washington during his tenure and what he felt was a growing threat against the unique political power of the president in setting American foreign policy and what the military need for defense.
The ninety-eight minute film then uses interviews with contemporary figures as diverse as Gore Vidal, John McCain, Richard Perle and William Kristol to showcase the filmmakers opinion that we still have too many Americans believing that the concept of never-ending war is good for the American economy and our nation's foreign policy goals that is transposed with historic footage and material regarding why we are currently in the conflict in faraway Iraq.
Dwight Eisenhower recognized the horrors of war and his farewell warning to the American people and his successors not to be taken in by those who promote the perpetual re-armament of our military so we can always be stronger than our perceived enemies still resonates with great force today. It's a sad commentary that in the forty-five years since he left office with that dire prediction that so few of our politicians chose to listen.
Movie Review: The Unholy Influence Of The Military/Industrial Complex
Summary: 5 Stars
Three days before his time as President ended, on January 17, 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a farewell address to the United States. And in it, this former five-star general who had helped lead America to victory in World War II warned us that we should guard against all unwarranted influence by what he called "the military/industrial complex." This important point is the fulcrum of writer/director Eugene Jarecki's 2006 documentary WHY WE FIGHT.
While it is probably no surprise that the film has a decidedly liberal political slant to it, WHY WE FIGHT still lays out a lot of terrifying implications on the table about why it is that the amount of money we spend on defense and war toys alone trumps the entire defense budgets of as many as twenty nations COMBINED, as well as the total budgets of all the other departments of our own government. Anything our leaders perceive as a threat to America is to be dealt with forthwith, regardless of the cost in money and in human lives--whether it's the Cold War, Vietnam, or, in our day, the 9/11 terror attacks and our subsequent invasion of Iraq, two events which, as anyone with common sense knows, had nothing to do with the other.
The main focus, of course, is the history of the unholy alliance between the Pentagon and American industry, which began at the end of World War II and has only exploded outward in size ever since. In interviews with such people as former CIA official Chalmers Johnson, right-wing commentator and think-tank maverick William Kristol, and Arizona senator John McCain, we witness how this beast that Eisenhower had warned us to be wary of eventually used its tentacles to wield its influence on members of Congress, and subsequently led to the development of the think-tank machinery that eventually led to the war in Iraq. And we also see the effects of what the CIA terms "blowback"--operations hatched inside Langley that have consequences that the public is never really told about until those consequences spring up (the 9/11 attacks being the biggest and most obvious example of blowback). When Jarecki's focus goes to the various civilians on the street to get their opinions on exactly why we go to war, particularly in Iraq, we get a lot of answers that seem to be uniform but are, in fact, mixed with contradictions. And as was the case with FAHRENHEIT 9/11, the media is subjected to utmost scrutiny for having given up on its duty to report the news properly for what has turned out to be misplaced, false patriotism and a lot of dead U.S. troops.
While it's only inevitable that right-wing pundits will dismiss this as just another paranoid post-9/11 liberal fantasy, much of the ammunition that Jarecki uses to make the case against the military/industrial complex is given to him by the very people (McCain; Kristol; Richard Perle) who have benefited from and propagated this mindset on the American people. And millions of Americans have either known or long suspected that the complex has had a very dangerous influence that not only reaches into the halls of Congress, but into all 435 Congressional districts, and ultimately to one's front doors.
Ultimately, it's the voracious maw of the Defense Department, its independent war contractors (Boeing; Halliburton, etc.), and power-happpy politicians who benefit the most, and a consenting American public that, for reasons that have nothing to do with reality, loses because it did not listen to the sage words of Eisenhower. We may never be able to totally stop the military/industrial complex dead in its tracks, especially not during our so-called "War On Terror", but WHY WE FIGHT warns us that we must limit its ability in the future to wage war at the expense of everything that we cherish the most about the United States of America.
Movie Review: Much better than Michael Moore's 9/11
Summary: 5 Stars
There's a sense of dreadful irony suffusing this documentary about Bush's war in Iraq. There's the case of the guy (Wilton Sekzer) whose son was killed in the 9/11 attacks. Fired with a desire for revenge, he writes the Pentagon to get his son's name put on a bomb that he hopes is dropped on those who killed his son. He's a retired cop and a Vietnam vet. He gets to see a photo of the bomb with his son's name on it. The terrible irony is the bomb is not dropped on somebody who might have killed his son. Instead it likely falls on civilians in Iraq.
This up close and personal irony mirrors the larger one: Bush had little interest in getting bin Laden and those responsible for the 9/11 murders. Instead he used those attacks as a rationale to pursue a personal agenda of shock and awe so that he might be in a position to avoid the fate of his father, who was a one-term president.
An even greater irony is in the title. "Why We Fight" is the name of a series of World War II films made by Frank Capra aimed at American soldiers going overseas to fight the Nazis or the Japanese imperialists. The irony is that in WWII it was clear why we had to fight. In Bush's war there was and is no clear necessity, moral or strategic, no sense of doing the right thing, of going against an enemy that would conquer us. Instead, there is just the terrible sense of waste, waste of over one hundred thousand human lives (and counting), waste of hundreds of billions of American dollars (that could have been put to better use at home)--all seemingly for the aggrandizement of one man and the twisted dreams of a handful of neocon chicken hawks drunk with power.
Another irony is that of the intelligence/information officer, Air Force Lt. Col. (ret.) Karen Kwiatkowski, who learned that much of the information that she was required to disseminate and swallow was misinformation and outright lies. And then there is the irony of the young pilots who were interviewed, who dropped the bombs. One is lead to say what an honor it was to drop one of the first bombs in Operation Iraqi Freedom, an operation he saw as liberating a people, an operation that had previously been called (with telling dramatic irony) Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL).
As the documentary reminds us, World War II was fought for oil as well, but it was the Japanese who started it to secure the oil fields in the South Pacific so that they could fuel further expansion in Asia, and by the Nazis who also had little to no domestic crude to fuel their maniac dreams of world domination.
What sets this documentary apart from some others (especially the somewhat shallow exercise by Michael Moore) is how the war is put in historical perspective. Director Eugene Jarecki shows how the illogic of the present meshes with that of the past as we see Rumsfeld making nice with Saddam Hussein in the days when we supported him as our dictator in the Middle East. And further removed we see the grainy ghosts of Vietnam past: John F. Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon... And then there are the many mendacious statements of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, et al., juxtaposed against the damning analysis of military and political experts.
In the final analysis Jarecki makes it clear that we fight to feed the vast military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about. As someone (Chalmers Johnson, I believe) remarks, with so much profit to be made in war, you can be sure that war will follow. How else to use up the munitions so that others might be manufactured and sold?
Movie Review: "You begin to wonder... there's something wrong with the entire system.."
Summary: 5 Stars
Heartsick. As I should be. As any human being with a shred of humanity left should be. And no one more so than the patriotic American.
"Why We Fight," Oliver Stone's stunning documentary on the real reasons behind the wars in which Americans are and have been involved, is a film every American should view, and more than once. Is war ever the right answer? I will not argue that it is not. There are such times. And there have been wars that I believe we should have fought. Self-defense, yes. In defense of human rights, yes. But, honestly, how many such wars have there been? Few.
Begin with Harry Truman (to date, the only president whose popularity rating was lower than that of George W. Bush at 23 percent) and the order he gave to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. As the documentary points out, it had nothing to do with ending the war or forcing the Japanese to surrender. They had been attempting to surrender for months. Truman gave the order to drop the bomb for the thrill of an explosion, the thrill of power, the thrill of a blood lust. Or perhaps one can just call it ... thrill of imperialism. That deadly explosion was the opening of a door that has never closed again, and it never will. This is now the legacy of Truman, and that day, the day we took off our white hats forever.
Eisenhower predicted in his parting speech from the presidency that we were on the road to building a military-industrial complex. He was right. Most wars since then (and several before then) have been for power, for imperialism, for an arrogance in seeing our way superior to all others, and now, our wars are for oil. The documentary interviews countless military experts, news figures and scholars, runs disturbing video clips of politicians - including film of George Bush and Dick Cheney dishing out propaganda to justify an unjustifiable war - telling blatant lies about the reasons we were attacking Iraq and later chuckling over it. (There's even a clip from a current presidential candidate, and one wonders at the disparity in his message here, even as he scampers away at the bidding of the vice president, and his message in the current campaign. Huh. Not where my vote is going.)
A connection to 9/11? Heartrending interviews with the father of a son killed in one of the two towers in New York on that date progress to show how one American was pulled in by that propaganda, felt the hate he was told to feel, sought the vengeance, requested his son's name be painted on the side of a missile that became a part of "shock and awe," only to find out, much later, the truth of that day. That some ninety percent of the casualties in Iraq that day were boys like his. Children. Housewives. Workers. Families in their homes at the break of what seemed an ordinary dawn. And that it had nothing to do with "freedom." For anyone.
Defending freedom? Defending nothing more than corporate and political interests. At the brink of a time when we are once again expected to vote in a presidential election, one can only hope for documentaries such as this to give Americans pause. As one military figure in this film remarks, it is not that we do not have the information we need. We have access to the Internet. We have access to all kinds of information. If we wish to know, we can know. What then is our excuse not to make wiser decisions and demand our government to be accountable? Truly, the buck stops here. In the mirror. In every mirror.
Movie Review: The Complicated Futility of Ignorance
Summary: 5 Stars
"Our govt did not want [re: 9/11] the forensic question asked, "what were their motives?" and instead chose to say they were just "evil doers." 9/11 provided a group of people deeply committed to the expansion of the American empire the opportunity to implement plans they had been laying since 1992 [PNAC] ...The Bush doctrine is certainly not something unprecedented, unknown in American life. This statement that we are going to dominate the world through military power, that we reserve to ourselves the right of pre-emptive war. It is an extreme statement of what has been there in the works for a long time." ~ Chalmers Johnson, CIA 67'-73', author of Blowback, and Sorrows of Empire
Eugene Jarecki [The Trials of Henry Kissinger] gives us a mainstream-oriented film that doesn't preach so much as it begs the question: where is America's voice of moral indignation over our domestic and foreign policies? This is in keeping with Dwight Eisenhower's - the hero of Jarecki's film - cryptic warning to the American public during his 1961 farewell address concerning the rise to prominence of the "military-industrial complex" which he framed not only in terms of collusion, but of widespread acceptance that would eventually arise due to a moral subversion that would creep into the collective consciousness, corrupting the spirit and diminishing our constitution's democratic ideals.
As dissident/linguist professor Noam Chomsky points out, "propaganda is to democracy what the bludgeon is to a dictatorship," and Eisenhower's prophetic warning suggests just that: within the mindset that drives policies favoring corporations, imperial ambitions and the pathological pursuit of profits over people, the populace would likely come to believe the propaganda and "manufacture of consent" as genuine fact; a given aspect of the American way which necessitates blind obedience and subsequent contempt for conscientious objectors.
This is akin to a totalitarian society, yet is something altogether different; peculiar, sinister, as the people's allegiance isn't coerced through the threat of state violence, such as it is within a closed society. But rather, it comes about through the massive media/educational/cultural passtime propaganda effort implemented 24/7 by the ruling elite who, within maintaining the ruse of a humane, democratic ideal, must deter people's inherent sense of elementary moral truisms in order to convince them that black is white/right is wrong, and so on.
What makes the American Empire different from others is not, as apologists claim, that it's a benevolent empire of ideas and ideals attempting to spread those ideas/ideals. No, what makes it different is its unprecedented technological capacity to control the public mind to the extent where people cannot distinguish parody from authenticity, thereby creating an Orwellian parallel reality that imprisons "hearts and minds." An imprisonment of perception that seemingly few are capable of understanding or breaking free from, or frankly, even caring about. To quote Orwell's 1984: "They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality...and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening."