Fight Club

Facing the nation: Former U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower in a television address. Photo Sony Pictures Classics/Charlotte Street Films.

Eugene Jarecki’s new documentary, Why We Fight, shares its title with a series of World War II propaganda films created by famed director Frank Capra. Capra’s films played to an American public fully convinced of the validity of its country’s war effort. But Jarecki’s film argues that the American war machine has co-opted the will of the people to such an extent that the issue of widespread support has become moot.

In his film, Jarecki asks various Americans, soldiers and civilians alike, why they think their country is so predisposed to war. Jarecki believes from the outset that we fight out of misplaced patriotism, greed and imperialistic fervour. His subjects often tell a different story. It is this tension between first-hand testimony and Jarecki’s overwhelming political slant that makes Why We Fight frustrating, somewhat intriguing, but ultimately impotent.

Jarecki (The Trials of Henry Kissinger) traces the development of the so-called war machine back to the post second world war era, notably the warnings issued by outgoing U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower (the putative star of Why We Fight). In his 1961 farewell address, Eisenhower cautioned against an economically and ethically untenable defence build-up called the “military-industrial complex.” The phrase summed up what Eisenhower thought was a growing coziness between government, the armed forces and private corporations; he felt that the U.S. waged war to ensure profit for the defence industry. Soon, a permanent military establishment came into being, a notion that Eisenhower — and, according to the film, even George Washington way back when — deemed a grave threat to American democracy.

Jarecki combines stirring footage of Eisenhower and extensive interviews with Ike’s son and granddaughter, all of which give credence to the filmmaker’s estimation of the former president as a warrior with a conscience, a military man with a precise moral compass. Jarecki doesn’t just like Ike — he adores him.

Subsequent leaders don’t fare quite as well. Jarecki outlines how the military-industrial complex has evolved, demonstrating its role in conflicts from World War II to Vietnam, Grenada to Iraq. Stock war footage is leavened with interviews from various experts on either side of the political divide, including The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol and Richard Perle (Donald Rumsfeld’s former adviser) on the right, and author Gore Vidal and Charles Lewis from The Center for Public Integrity on the left. All offer critiques and explanations along partisan lines. The film boils 20th-century American history down to a series of secret operations and backroom deals, the “triumph of capitalism over democracy” (Lewis’s words) and the economic imperative of combat. According to Jarecki, one nation under God has become one nation under the thumb of an increasingly bloodthirsty war industry.

The war room: A Department of Defense strategy session. Photo Sony Pictures Classics/US Department of Defense.

In the film, historian Gwynne Dyer argues that during George W. Bush’s presidency, the military-industrial bond has become even more complex, adding to its power structure legions of unelected and unaccountable intellectuals and think tanks, all determined to establish global American supremacy. Like his ideological counterpart, Michael Moore, Jarecki employs familiar (if still unsettling) footage — Rumsfeld joshing with Saddam Hussein; Bush admitting that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 — to build a simplistic indictment of the current U.S. administration.

Jarecki attempts to buttress his case with interviews with lesser-known subjects, including Iraqi civilians victimized by the war, unidentified Americans at an air show and the two pilots responsible for the first strikes in the second Gulf War. Two subjects in particular stand out. The first, a retired New York City cop and Vietnam vet named Wilton Sekzer, lost his son in the World Trade Center attacks. The voluble Sekzer explains how, in the name of revenge, he requested that the U.S. Air Force write his son’s name on a bomb they planned to drop on Iraq. The military obliged. But when the link between 9/11 and Saddam proves false, Sekzer’s faith in the legitimacy of the war is shattered. Meanwhile, William Solomon, a jittery 23-year-old who recently lost his mother and can’t hold down a job, decides that the air force will provide refuge and purpose. He’s sent to Iraq to serve as a helicopter mechanic.

Both of these men deserve entire films of their own; their few minutes of screen time are extremely compelling. But by including their stories, Jarecki actually undermines his argument. The military may have exploited Sekzer and Solomon’s confusion and desperation, but their stories have little to do with the military-industrial complex Jarecki condemns. Sekzer’s thirst for vengeance speaks to primal urges that existed long before defence contracts; Solomon’s reasons for becoming a soldier are not part of some grand design, like the Project for a New American Century. The young man just wanted to work, to travel, to take his mind off his loss. His reasons, right or wrong, are as old as war itself.

Jarecki includes footage of U.S. congressmen passing bills that ensure their respective states all receive a portion of the defence industry’s massive proceeds. By demonstrating the profit motive, Jarecki suggests that average citizens are complicit in the war machine. Yet the main targets of Jarecki’s scorn are presidents, arms manufacturers and grand ideology. For Jarecki, it’s easier, both cinematically and intellectually, to take refuge in the notion of an American empire. But such abstractions obscure the fact that there are real people losing lives — and real people who want to take them. Ironically, Jarecki’s rage against an intangible war machine becomes as futile as Bush’s war on terror. Cold comfort, indeed.

Why We Fight opens Feb. 17 in Toronto and Vancouver.

Jason McBride is a Toronto-based writer and editor.

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