Why We Fight
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Movie Reviews of Why We Fight
Movie Review: Well done - must see documentary
Summary: 5 Stars
Great documentary on the military-industrial complex and the forces that compel us to go to war. In my opinion, this documentary did not blatantly walk along partisan lines and placed responsibility equally onto the shoulders of every administration since WWII.
There isn't any information that is necessarily new, but when it's all put together in this format, it can be overwhelming. You'll never look at the press and our nations motives the same again.
One of the most staying impressions this film left on me was the idea that we are a nation without memory - this documentary so easily pointed out how we as a nation are involved in conflict after conflict every few years with virtually the same build up and marginal success. Even I found that I had forgotten a number of conflicts from my lifetime, until they were brought up in this film again. So considering that we haven't had a "cut and dry" victory since WWII, why do we fight? This documentary gives you a good start on answering that question.
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: A must see
Summary: 5 Stars
This documentary should be viewed by everyone that thinks the military is the answer to conflicts. Eisenhower was a visionary, unfortunately, he has been over shadowed by the neocon environment. Movie Review: Everyone should watch it
Summary: 5 Stars
Breaks things down quite nicely. I just wanted to get this in there to give the movie another 5 star rating. I am sure everybody else can give you the summary of the movie.Movie Review: Bottom Line: '...a MUST SEE movie for all Americans...'
Summary: 5 Stars
A very insightful look into our nation's plight... should be required viewing for all Americans. Also read Gore Vidal's books, i.e. 'Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace', and 'Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia', and 'Decline and Fall of the American Empire (The Real Story Series)'