WHY WE FIGHT
Directed & Written by: Eugene Jarecki.
Produced by: Eugene Jarecki & Susannah Shipman.
Director of Photography: Etienne Sauret & May Ying Welsh.
Edited by: Nancy Kennedy.
Music by: Robert Miller.
Released by: Sony Pictures Classics.
Country of Origin: USA/France/UK/Canada/Denmark. 98 min. Rated: PG-13.
DVD Features: Commentary track by filmmaker Jarecki & Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, US Army. Extra scenes. Extended character featurettes. Filmmaker TV appearances: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart & The Charlie Rose Show. Audience Q&A with filmmaker. English audio. Optional Spanish/French/Portuguese subtitles. Trailer.

After Harry S. Truman's recent reemergence in popularity, perhaps now it's time to reappraise Dwight D. Eisenhower, the prescient hero of this dense, wide-ranging documentary. Why We Fight opens with his farewell address, a warning of the pervasive influence of America's military industrial complex, the subject of director Eugene Jarecki's film. Named after Frank Capra's WWII propaganda films, Jarecki's exposé supplies an answer to the title's tacit question in the response of Chalmers Johnson, formerly of the CIA: "When war is more profitable, you'll see more of it." Covering over 60 turbulent years, there's more than enough material for several films, let alone one, but Jarecki never digresses and lucidly makes his points with a timeline that ricochets from the Iraqi War to World War II, Vietnam, and then back again to the present, though the Cold War is given little screen time. The urgency - or fear mongering - that led to the arms race with the Soviet Union is only referred to as one of many far-reaching issues.

The film's dominated by mild-mannered but emphatic talking heads, such as Susan Eisenhower, the president's granddaughter. Besides noted critics of the Bush administration (Gore Vidal and Dan Rather), Jarecki has rounded up a litany of voices who probably wouldn't touch Michael Moore with a 10-foot pole, like Senator John McCain, Pentagon advisor Richard Perle and conservative writer William Kristol. When Perle declares there's no connection between Vice President Dick Cheney and his former employer, Halliburton, which has been awarded lucrative military contracts in Iraq, McCain, on the other hand, comments it doesn't look right, before he cuts short the interview to take a call from Cheney.

For those who have seen Richard Greenwald's Uncovered: The War on Iraq, there's bound to be a sense of déjà vu. Both films feature the articulate Lt. Col Karen Kwiatkowski, formerly of the Pentagon Middle Eastern desk, as a key mouthpiece. Jarecki even has his own Lila Lipscomb in former New York City cop Wilton Sekzer, who lost his son on 9/11 in the World Trade Center. After initially supporting the war in Iraq, Sekzer feels exploited for his need for revenge.

Like Moore's personal profiles, Jarecki also follows a young recruit preparing to leave for boot camp and presumably to war, but his agrument is more effective in the interviews' acute observations. One particularly graphic segment deals with the lack of information out of Iraq. Chalmers Johnson concedes the Vietnam War was lost because it couldn't be kept private off television. According to Kwiatkowski, the Pentagon has shaped the news in the latest war by orchestrating what the media sees. Bringing the war to closer to home, Jarecki takes his camera on a tour of a Baghdad morgue where civilian corpses have been left rotting, evidence to the contrary of the effectiveness of precision air strikes.

However, one glaring example of revisionist history is not contradicted. Discussing the dawn of the Atomic Age, the ever-dry Vidal claims the Japanese wanted to surrender but Truman wouldn't listen. That would have been news to the emperor. Even after the first bomb dropped, there was no indication of capitulation by Japan's military government. Kent Turner
January 20,2006

DVD Extras: Providing context that crucially deepens one's understanding and appreciation of the film, the extras greatly complement Jarecki’s concisely calibrated history of American military conflict since WWII. After most of the bonuses, there is a website address (whywefight.com) where viewers can find more information on Jarecki’s public policy organization, The Eisenhower Project, which produced the doc. The forming of the initiative is especially notable in light of Jarecki’s stated beliefs, in both his audio commentary and the included TV interviews, that part of what Eisenhower was warning against in his farewell address was the rise of “misplaced power,” i.e. unelected government officials in so-called “think tanks,” such as the conservative Project for a New American Century – who, in their eventual role as government advisors to the Bush administration, essentially orchestrated the justification building up to the Iraqi War. In entering the political arena, it would seem that Jarecki, through his group, seeks to provide a countering force - a fact that would be interesting to hear him talk about in more detail. Hopefully, his will be more of an advocacy organization rather than yet another lobbying group.

In his TV appearances, Jarecki’s demeanor is quite scholarly and sober. In his conversation with Charlie Rose, as in the commentary, Jarecki suggests that not only did he borrow the title of director Frank Capra’s series of WWII propaganda films, but that he is convinced this is the movie Capra, a staunchly anti-authoritarian populist, would have made in response to the public perception of today’s war.

Meanwhile, the character featurettes and extra scenes delve into the personal stories of some of the film’s participants, who ultimately make this abundantly researched work truly stand out. Moreover, the commentary track supplies a glimpse into the relationship between the military brass and the White House, via the musings of Col. Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff and a true Beltway insider. Wilkerson’s interaction with Jarecki is also remarkable in that, despite disagreeing with him somewhat politically, he concedes the validity of the movie’s conclusions on the contemporary waging of war. One issue that the commentary does not resolve, however, is the controversial statement by Gore Vidal about Japan having unsuccessfully tried to surrender for months before President Truman ordered the dropping of the atomic bombs as a show of American strength to the Communists. When Jarecki asks Wilkerson about it, Wilkerson insists politely, if somewhat vaguely, that even if Truman made such a strategic calculation, it was one of numerous related factors (thereby not firmly negating Vidal's assertion). Besides this, Jarecki does not address why he never questioned Sen. McCain about the fact that, despite the senator’s misgivings regarding current military action, he continues to support the war and the administration. Reymond Levy
June 27,2006