Why We Fight
Why We Fight makes good on this ambition, opening with President Eisenhower’s prophetic 1961 farewell speech, in which he identified the military-industrial complex as a threat to democratic governance, and following this premise through 9/11 and the Iraq war. Jarecki looks at the arms industry’s cozy relationship with Congress and visits one of the neocon think tanks where the Bush Doctrine was hatched. He revisits Dick Cheney’s career with Halliburton and the administration’s massaging of the facts in the case against Saddam Hussein. He listens respectfully to political commentators both right (Richard Perle, William Kristol, John McCain) and left (Gore Vidal, Charles Lewis, Dan Rather) as they review 60 years of American realpolitik and weigh in on the current conflict. But replacing the villain at the movie’s core are a half-dozen private individuals Jarecki picked up along the way, and their very human relationships with America’s military machine demonstrate the depth of the problem.
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Fluidly edited by Nancy Kennedy, Why We Fight interweaves these personal stories not only with history but with one another, yielding some choice ironies. A clip of President Johnson announcing attacks against two American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin–attacks that, though the second was later disproved, were the basis for the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam–introduces Sekzer’s memories of serving as a helicopter door gunner in that war. “From the perspective of a helicopter,” he says, “you’re up x-number hundreds of feet, and you’re shooting at little dots that are running around. You’re not shooting at somebody face-to-face. It’s almost like they’re not real human beings. They’re objects.” From here Jarecki introduces Ahn Duong, who came to the U.S. at age 15 after her family was evacuated from Saigon in April 1975. Her story might seem like a facile rebuke to Sekzer if not for the fact that she’s now a navy explosives expert, part of the team that developed the “bunker-buster” bombs heralded at the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
