Why We Fight Movie Review:


Eugene Jarecki’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winner, “Why We Fight,” is a more unapologetically one-sided, damning view of our war machine workings than “The Fog of War,” winner of many honors including the 2003 Academy Award for Best Documentary. In the latter film, director Errol Morris admitted his own slant: from World War II’s Curtis LeMay on through an unemotional Robert S. McNamara and beyond, America’s military mentality is of a piece, notable in the disastrous adventure in Vietnam.

Not relying on recreations, but through selection of interviewees, historical and current footage and its arrangement, narrational script and tone, even music, Jarecki, the writer as well as director “Why We Fight,” makes no bones about which side he is on. Controversial, the result should confirm the choir in its beliefs and infuriate those in favor of the war in Iraq and intervention elsewhere.

Facts are cogently arranged here, but, although the word “fact” itself receives one of the longest definitions in the “Oxford English Dictionary,” the editor of “The Cambridge Factfinder” nevertheless notes that “there are facts about fictions and fictions about facts,” near-facts and transient ones as well as those that are qualified, arguable, politically biased or contrived. “Nor is a fact a simple, isolated piece of information.”

Thus mentally armed, the viewer is set to face this undeniably effective film, its purpose to raise questions about “why we are doing what we are doing” and the effects on others and ourselves, its title consciously taken verbatim from Major Frank Capra’s seven-part 1942-45 series -- “dramatic successes . . . emotionalized history lessons,” wrote Eric Barnouw thirty years later -- and echoed in the Hooblers’ 1990 volume, “Vietnam Why We Fought.”

Aside from cheap shots of ugly Middle America, editor Nancy Kennedy does a professional job of interweaving faces famous and unknown, TV coverage and especially Sky News from Baghdad, old and new film and random clips of military hardware. The Department of Defense gave permission to talk to people up and down its chain of command, but ordinary citizens are also given their say, as well as a number of Iraqis who bring a sobering reality beyond our trivializing entertainment nightly newscasts.

Jarecki’s point, like Morris's, derives from the concept that present policy is not isolated in time but demonstrably continues and culminates sixty and more years of accretion. However, whereas Morris dwells on central figure McNamara’s structured “eleven lessons,” his wholehearted dependence on numbers and fallible reason, this newer non-fiction would trace the rapid growth of American empire, which, it points out, flies in the face of George Washington’s farewell caution against entanglements abroad (long a bulwark of isolationists) and a steep slippery slope which doomed, among others, Imperial Rome.

There are two heroes here, the historical one rather a surprise, for the tendency is to think of Dwight D. Eisenhower as grandfatherly lightweight. Not merely in interviews with his aware grandchildren, however, but in his own words, especially those of the Farewell Address of 1961, the former general, university president and golfer warned of a “military-industrial complex” arising in the overwhelming nationalistic fervor -- and huge profits -- of the Second World War. Those ‘50s were not just Elvis and poodle skirts, but the dangerous birthdate of immense profiteering, the beginning of true capitalism of war.

No longer trifling with tea or opium, slaves or timber or piffling military promotions, Twenty/Twenty-first-Century colonialism came into being then, on the wings of mega-corporation’s need for unrestricted overseas markets and for upgrade contracts with the Pentagon, i.e., for uninterrupted warfare. Thus, the nefarious complex expanded to take in legislators, who profited in their bank accounts and in being able to point to jobs for constituents back home; and to take in the various “think tanks,” portrayed as little more than intellectual propagandists; and to take in the media, corporate-owned and dependent on access to the halls of power.

Alongside the high rollers are smaller fry like military careerist Karen Kwiatkowski, who quit the Army’s Iraq Desk when the petroreasons for demonizing former ally Saddam Hussein became apparent, or young Will Solomon, who enlists for six years following financial problems and his anti-war mother’s death. Most of all is the second hero, reflective retired New York police officer Wilton Sekzer, with whom the documentary opens and closes: losing “one of the greatest sons in the world” in the World Trade Center, he believed his leaders’ assertions, petitioned to have that son’s name stenciled on a bomb targeted for Iraq, and later saw that his own government had lied and “exploited my feelings of patriotism.”

Moving and brave, this father came to reverse his opinion. But this film will change no one else’s: unashamedly slanted, it will confirm those who already disavow the nation’s course, and will be ignored by those applauding that course.

Donald Levit

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