Why We Fight DVD

More than three years after its first appearance at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury prize, documentarian Eugene Jarecki’s polemic against the American way of war at last makes it to DVD in this country.

Jarecki’s film attempts to map the influence of big business on US foreign policy. It takes, as its starting point, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning, in his 1961 farewell address, about what he called “the military-industrial complex”: the alliance of military professionals, arms industry executives and politicians who together stand to benefit most from continued overseas military activity.

This is a partisan history of the second half of the American century and the beginning of this one, but some facts are indisputable: since WWII, the US has lurched from one conflict to another. Our closest ally really is an exceptionally bellicose nation.

To hear Jarecki and many of his interviewees tell it, this aggression is motivated by the greed and self-interest of a smallish number of conservative hawks who have hoodwinked US citizens by appealing to their patriotism and preying on their fears. Eisenhower, in 1961, called for all Americans to be vigilant, less the country slip from their grasp into the hands of the warmongers and profiteers. Americans have not been vigilant, argues Jarecki’s film. They’ve built an empire on other people’s misery, and now they must watch it crumble.

Why We Fight – ironically titled after a series of Frank Capra-directed propaganda films of the Forties – uses the traditional mixture of talking heads and archive footage to make its points. Big guns from both sides, liberal and neocon, are rolled out, including Gore Vidal, John McCain, Richard Perle, John Eisenhower and Dan Rather. The footage that accompanies these interviews is well chosen and effectively edited.

How you take all of it will depend on where you stand. There’s a strong sense of preaching to the converted about Why We Fight and I found it confirmed my prejudices: right wing bad, peaceniks good. Others may regard it as too close to conspiracy theorising to merit more than passing attention. One thing is certain: the present situation cannot last. America’s stock abroad has never been lower, and that point Why We Fight makes very well.