EMILY SETTON

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                David Judd

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oday, with our troops engaged in Iraq ... I think it's crucial to ask the questions: 'Why are we doing what we are doing? What is it doing to others? And what is it doing to us?'” These are not new questions, but director Eugene Jarecki sheds some new light on them in his latest documentary, Why We Fight. He doesn't answer his questions, but he does provide important and thoughtfully selected background material. The film, which won the Grand Jury Prize for documentaries at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, speaks primarily to those who already oppose the war but aren't sure at whom to be angry.

Jarecki, whose best-known previous work is the 2002 documentary The Trials of Henry Kissinger, said in a BBC interview that he works in an “essayist style that is unafraid to be opinionated ... where documentaries are carrying the torch that was once carried by journalists.” His work is a desperately needed antidote to the balanced 50-50 diet of Democratic and Republican viewpoints churned out by the corporate media.

The film consists largely of interviews with a number of commentators, from the left and right, accompanied by video footage that dramatically supports or refutes them. Despite the wide range of commentary, however, the documentary remains cohesive, unified by several gradually unfolding stories. One of the most compelling is that of Wilton Sekzer, a retired NYPD sergeant whose son was killed on Sept. 11. Feeling that “somebody had to pay for this,” and “want[ing] the enemy dead,” he got an air force unit in Iraq to write his son's name on a bomb dropped during the invasion. But after President Bush was finally “forced to clarify,” as CNN put it, that Saddam Hussein wasn't responsible for the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Sekzer became disillusioned. He was “mad,” “hurt,” and began to think, “if the President of the United States” can get away with being “a liar ... there's something wrong with the entire system.”

The filmmakers interview the stealth fighter pilots, Fuji and Tooms, who made the first air strike and who cheerfully describe the gadgetry that guides their bombs to their targets and recount the excitement of “liberation.” This is contrasted with a subtitled interview with an Iraqi man who lost his son and two nephews, possibly in the same strike. He asks, “A family sleeping in their houses and they bomb them. Is that smart?” The moment near the end of the film when the two halves of the tale are finally connected is quite powerful.

The primary analytical framework for the film starts with President Eisenhower's famous farewell address, in which he warned against “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Jarecki has said that he didn't want to identify a single villain; yet if one exists in Why We Fight, it's the military-industrial complex. One of the best-argued segments of the film is the discussion of how the entanglements of multinational corporations, defense contractors, the Pentagon, civilian think tanks, and Congressional committees are driven much more by the interests of wealthy and powerful individuals and organizations than by valid national security concerns. By the time Ricard Perle, a fellow at the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and an advisor to President Bush, is shown asserting that Vice President Cheney's Halliburton connections have had no influence on his conduct in office, the audience is prepared to laugh.

However, as it delves into the history and functioning of the military-industrial complex, the film becomes confused. The biggest problem is that the documentary, by presenting only snatches of each anti-war commentator and no disagreement between them, conflates all antiwar views into one. This is, of course, badly misleading. Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the US Air Force, and Chalmers Johnson, a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego, for example, have very different ideas about how far back and how deep the military-industrial complex goes, but the film fails to address these distinctions.

Johnson, an ex-CIA consultant, describes the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war as the logical extreme of long-running trends in United States foreign policy. In one segment, he traces the roots of the Iraq war back to 1953, when Iranian Prime Minister Mohamed Mossadegh was removed in a CIA-directed coup. This led eventually to the 1979 Iranian revolution and the rise to power of Ayatollah Khomeini. In turn, the U.S. supported Hussein's Iraq as a counterweight to Iran, but only until he invaded Kuwait. At this point, the U.S. positioned troops in Saudi Arabia to launch the 1991 Gulf War. According to Johnson, the U.S. soldiers in Saudi Arabia are one of Bin Laden's primary grievances, and the rest of the history of U.S. intervention has provided him with support. This, he says, is “blowback” — a CIA term for the unintended consequences of covert operations abroad.

Kwiatkowski, on the other hand, seems to have been happy working at the Pentagon until the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when she saw firsthand the manufacturing and manipulation of intelligence to justify war in the Office of Special Plans. She lauds Eisenhower, who was responsible for the overthrow of Mossadegh as well as numerous other interventions, and she complains about the politicization of the Defense Department as if it were a new phenomenon. According to Kwiatkowski, America's imperial ambitions are at least to some degree the work of “certain policymakers,” and if the institutions of the military-industrial complex have allowed the administration to get away with implementing these ambitions, this is not necessarily any more indicative of a need for structural reform than it was for Eisenhower, who argued that “we have been compelled to create” the military-industrial complex by the Soviet threat. But Jarecki seems hardly to notice the contradiction between these views.

Early on, the filmmakers quote Gore Vidal critiquing “the United States of Amnesia,” but nevertheless, an idealization of the past pervades the film. Each interviewee seems to believe that an original American Way, free of militarism, can be found as long as the search back through history for the moment of degeneration is extended far enough. The reliance on Eisenhower as an anti-imperial spokesman in his own right adds to the problem. Jarecki told an interviewer that “it wasn't lost on [him] that [Eisenhower] was an almost pioneering actor in American covert action throughout the world,” that Eisenhower was “responsible for a number of the steps that led to the Vietnam War.” Yet Why We Fight barely criticizes him.

Finally, Why We Fight persuades us that we must act but doesn't give us any suggestions of what to do. Should we depend upon electoral politics, or engage in a street-based mass movement? Do we need better people in office, systemic reform, or socialist revolution? Jarecki doesn't seem interested. Kwiatkowski and Eisenhower are the only ones who are shown offering any kind of solution, and the last words quoted in the documentary are Kwiatkowski's: “I think we fight because basically not enough people are standing up saying, I'm not doing this anymore.'”

Standing up and “not doing this anymore” could mean mass civil disobedience, physical sabotage of our local components of the system, a general strike — but more likely, it means signing a petition, publicly making our opinions heard, and stopping there. There's no call to cooperate or organize. The documentary ends up implying that its own awareness-raising is an end in itself; now that we've seen it, our duty is just to get our friends to see it, too. Of course, we probably should — it's an entertaining and informative movie — but we need to look elsewhere to figure out the long-term targets, let alone the tactics, of the antiwar movement.