The title of Eugene Jarecki's "Why We Fight" sounds like both a declaration and a question. While variations on these three words are repeated throughout the film - posed as a question to various Joes, Janes and sometimes little Timmy - it is clear from the start of this agitprop entertainment that Mr. Jarecki has a very good idea why America has seemed so eager to pick up arms over the past half-century. Calvin Coolidge famously said that the chief business of the American people is business; 80 years later, Mr. Jarecki forcefully, if not with wholesale persuasiveness, argues that our business is specifically war.
Another American president is critical to that argument. On Jan. 17, 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered his farewell address to the country. Writing in longhand - one of the more arresting images in the film is the tablet on which he wrote his famous speech, scratched-out words and all - Eisenhower took stock of the nation, its recent wars and its military might. "In the councils of government," warned this president and former general of the Army, "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes."
Mr. Jarecki borrowed the title "Why We Fight" from a series of films made by Frank Capra for the military during World War II, and it's after that war that the story of the military-industrial complex begins. It's a story Mr. Jarecki tells with appreciable energy, using images culled from newsreels, educational and military films, and original material. Bombs explode, wars are fought, and talking heads fill the screen. The editor of The Weekly Standard, William Kristol, waves the flag for the right, while Gore Vidal shakes his pompoms for the left, invoking American amnesia. Everyone sounds smart, if not always convincing, as when Mr. Vidal states that Truman dropped atom bombs on Japan only to frighten Stalin and declare war on Communism, even though the Japanese were trying to surrender.
Mr. Vidal's assertion would give some historians pause and others an attack of apoplexy. Which raises a problem with films of this type: Who's telling the truth? Crammed with facts, or at least assertions of fact, "Why We Fight" presents a battalion of experts delivering what sound like reasonable historical overviews and political analyses. Given the sheer wealth of information, however - more than 50 years of American military history and dozens of wars and military adventures are wedged into the film's 99-minute running time - even an attentive observer of the geopolitical landscapes past and present might have a hard time separating the chaff from the wheat, ideologically framed arguments from those more empirically grounded.
To his credit, Mr. Jarecki doesn't bother with the fig leaf of journalistic objectivity as far too many nonfiction filmmakers try to do; his political agenda in this film is as clear as Michael Moore's in "Fahrenheit 9/11." Unlike Mr. Moore, however, Mr. Jarecki eschews folksy populism to sell his message; instead, he employs his skills as an archivist, interviewer and researcher, as well as the talents of his editor, Nancy Kennedy, to sell the goods. He likes Ike - or at least Eisenhower's powerful farewell speech - and he clearly doesn't like the current president, or at least his doctrine. Using a former president to shore up an argument is very canny; using a former Republican president as ammunition against another Republican president is doubly so.
One person's politically convincing argument is another's propagandistic screed, and whether you buy the film will doubtless depend on your existing beliefs. That said, even those of radical political persuasion might find it hard to accept Mr. Jarecki's argument that American militarism is, underneath the talk about freedom and democracy, a simple question of dollars. If nothing else, such thinking ignores that wars are fought not just by governments working in concert with big business and lobbyists, but also by people. In this respect, Mr. Jarecki's use of a retired New York cop named Wilton Sekzer, who lost his son on 9/11 and supported the invasion of Iraq because he believed President Bush's assertion that the two were linked, is problematic, and not only because one grieving father cannot represent an entire nation.
Mr. Sekzer is a deeply sympathetic figure, as much for his anger as for his choked-back tears. Yet his desire for vengeance, which seems to spring from someplace deep inside him and makes him sound almost Homeric, works against the film. In Mr. Jarecki's formulation, successive American governments have waged wars and conducted secret military operations for profit, and then sold these campaigns to us as necessary, even righteous. The idea is that because the public buys the lies, it also buys the wars. Too bad this doesn't explain why people buy lies, including the obvious ones. There's something comforting in the idea that our mistakes can be pinned on presidents, propaganda and Halliburton, perhaps because then it seems as if we didn't have anything to do with them.
"Why We Fight" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It contains some disturbing war images.
Why We Fight
Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.
Written and directed by Eugene Jarecki; directors of photography, Étienne Sauret and May Ying Welsh; edited by Nancy Kennedy; music by Robert Miller; produced by Mr. Jarecki and Susannah Shipman; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 99 minutes.
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