About.com Rating

This compelling documentary peers into our motivations for going to war and finds disturbing results.

It's an Important Question: Why Do We Fight?

 

Why We Fight, a 2005 documentary released at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, was a runner-up for my list of the 10 best war documentaries of all time, and is an ideological companion piece to Iraq for Sale: War Profiteers.

The film opens with a compelling image that might be unexpected for younger viewers.

It certainly was for me. The film's first shot is of former Republican President Dwight Eisenhower -- firmly embedded in the collective American memory as a general and military man -- offering his farewell address to the nation, where he asks the country to, "...beware the military industrial complex." In a modern political environment where Republicanism is equated with military adventurism, it's startling to see a presumably right-wing figure telling us, the citizens of America, that one of the great threats to our nation is, in fact, the military itself.

Or rather, the military industrial complex.

And that's more the subject of this documentary. Not the soldiers and sailors and airman that make up the military, but the private contractors, weapons manufacturers, and for-profit intelligence and surveillance operations. As Eisenhower explains, as a nation, we are increasingly becoming captive to a massive armaments build-up, "...of vast proportions." To provide comment and perspective, the film offers a broad range of talking head, the diversity of ideologies serving to compliment the complexity of the conversation.

Included are left-wing author Chalmers Johnson, politician Richard Perle, Professor Noam Chomsky, and Senator John McCain, among others.

Taking its name from the Word War II-era propaganda movies that were produced by the U.S. government to justify their decision to fight in the war, Why We Fight opens with a historical overview of U.S. military spending and then arrives at its central thesis: That in every decade since World War II, the U.S. public has been misled to participate in an armed conflict.

 

An Incentive to Engage in Combat

One of the film's most wince-inducing moments, is when it periodically cuts away to pick-up shots of average people in the park, or walking down the street, who are asked the question, "Why do we fight?" It's an unexpected question to be sure, and its phrasing as a question is rather opaque, nonetheless, it's disturbing to hear so many people respond with the sort of butterball patriotic euphemisms normally given to us by politicians:

We fight for freedom.

We fight for democracy.

We fight for truth, justice, and the American way of life.

We also, as the film points out, have engaged in wars for resources, to exercise geo-political power, and to perpetuate ideology. To make its point, the film then takes us through a brief summary of American military involvement. It includes the big ones, both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam, but also a veritable endless list of the sort of "brush fire" conflicts that most Americans were probably unaware the U.S. had even participated within. From inserting American Marines in Honduras on behalf of the United Fruit Company some seven times between 1903 and 1925, to providing military support for right wing militias in Nicaragua, the list of small scale episodes of American military involvement is extensive.

As the film points out, these episodes are often sold to the American people under the guise of idealistic principle, or out of fear. The most recent war in Iraq comes to mind, with the Bush administration going on a campaign where they warned the American people about the, "smoking gun that would come in the form of a mushroom cloud." But it could just as easily have been the Gulf of Tonkin incident, recently realized to have been a lie, or Reagan's support of the Nicaraguan freedom fighters (which turned out to be paramilitary death squads), in order that he could back the big business interests that feared the dissolution of their wealth should a Communist government be voted into power.

In addition to exploring the frequency of participating in military conflicts for specious reasons, the film also touches on the issue of military spending and how having so many dependent industries, creates a social incentive to build-up the military. (You can click through to read about this year's budget of 600 hundred plus billion for defense spending and the effect that this has on the economy.)

This massive allotment in proportion to all other spending is an incredibly important issue. Each choice to build a bomber jet is a choice not to build infrastructure, or some number of schools. A tradeoff that is perhaps even more agitated when one considers that the bomber jet might not have been necessary had the U.S. only participated in conflicts that were truly necessary for its own defense. Or, even more troubling, consider that the bomber jet might not have been needed at all. That it might have only been built to satiate a weapons manufacturer that had used its routine lobbying in-roads to Congress, in order to secure contracts for weapons procurement that the military might have never wanted.

But it's not just fighter jets, or rather too many fighter jets. Defense spending has become a penumbra of protection for all manner of products and services, many of them never wanted by the Pentagon, but given to the Pentagon irregardless of their desire, precisely because some Congressmen has negotiated for the inclusion in order to benefit a donor. Getting labelled as defense spending is a form of protection, because whether your service or product is worthy, or helpful, or even necessary, no politician wants to be seen as cutting defense spending that would harm the troops.

It's a testament to the effectiveness of the military industrial complex's political prowess that military budgets have largely been immune to the budget cutting affecting all other parts of our government, which begs the question: Is our capacity for war our single largest priority as a nation?

If it's not, then how come we're spending that way? Consider that in the most recent Federal budget, it was considered a massive success to simply reduce the rate of increase for Federal spending on the military.

Why do we fight?

For many reasons. Unfortunately, not all of them have anything to do with our security.

Bottom Line:Why We Fight is a compelling, powerful documentary that has a much needed conversation with the American people.