Why We Fight is a 2005 documentary film by Eugene Jarecki about the military–industrial complex. The title refers to the World War II–era eponymous propaganda films commissioned by the U.S. Government to justify their decision to enter the war against the Axis powers.

Why We Fight was first screened at the Sundance Film Festival on January 17, 2005, exactly forty-four years after President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address. Although it won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, the film received a limited public cinema release on January 22, 2006. It also won one of the 2006 Grimme Awards in the competition "Information & Culture"; the prize is one of Germany's most prestigious for television productions and a Peabody Award in 2006.

Synopsis

Why We Fight describes the rise and maintenance of the United States military–industrial complex and its 50-year involvement with the wars led by the United States to date, especially its 2003 invasion of Iraq. The documentary asserts that in every decade since World War II, the American public was misled so that the government (incumbent Administration) could take them to war and fuel the military-industrial economy maintaining American political dominance in the world. Interviewed about this matter are politician John McCain, political scientist and former CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson, politician Richard Perle, neoconservative commentator William Kristol, writer Gore Vidal, and public policy expert Joseph Cirincione.

Why We Fight documents the consequences of said foreign policy with the stories of a Vietnam War veteran whose son was killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks, and who then asked the military to write the name of his dead son on any bomb to be dropped in Iraq; a 23-year-old New Yorker who enlists in the United States Army because he was poor and in debt, his decision impelled by his mother's death; and a military explosives scientist (Anh Duong) who arrived in the U.S. as a refugee child from Vietnam in 1975.

Producer's list

The producer's list included "more than a dozen organizations, from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to the United Kingdom's BBC, Estonia's ETV and numerous European broadcasters" but no U.S. names. The Sundance Institute did, however, provide completion funding. and a specialist talking to basketball coaches in Kuwait at Camp Virginia. The coaches are on their way to Iraq to participate in Operation Hardwood 5 which is a program that brings US basketball coaches to the American troops in the Middle East.

  • Frank "Chuck" Spinney, retired military Analyst: Lehigh University-schooled mechanical engineer (class of 1967), worked in the USAF, in Ohio, before working in the Pentagon's Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation in 1977. He became a harsh critic of the Pentagon, later known as the "Conscience of the Pentagon", when he attacked the spiraling spending increase in the report "Defense facts of life", published in 1982, later known as the "Spinney Report", which earned a cover on Time magazine.
  • Gore Vidal, author of : writer, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and essayist, he has written books on American foreign policy explaining the American empire.

Military participants

  • 'Fuji' and 'Tooms': USAF stealth fighter pilots 'Fuji' and 'Tooms' dropped the first bombs on Baghdad city, starting the Iraq War in 2003.
  • Colonel Richard Treadway, Commander USAF Stealth Fighter Squadron: Vice-Commander of the 49th Fighter Wing of the U.S. Air Force.
  • Colonel Walter W. Saeger Jr., director, U.S. Air Force Munitions Directorate: Director of the Air-to-Surface Munitions Directorate, Ogden Air Logistics Center, Hill Air Force Base in Utah.
  • Karen Kwiatkowski: a retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel of the Pentagon working with the National Security Agency.
  • James G. Roche, Secretary of the Air Force: Twentieth United States Secretary of the Air Force.
  • Nguyet Anh Duong: inventor of the thermobaric bunker buster bomb, refugee from South Vietnam.

DVD commentators

  • Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: From 1984 to 1987, Col. Wilkerson was Executive Assistant to Admiral Stewart A. Ring, USN, Director for Strategy and Policy (J5) USCINCPAC. In the 1990s Col. Wilkerson was Director of the USMC War College, Quantico, Virginia. He has written much about military and national security affairs in mainstream and professional journals.

Reception

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 78% of 115 critics' reviews are positive. The website's consensus reads: "A provocative and timely film that explores the military/industrial complex and the motivating forces that lead us to war." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 68 out of 100, based on 32 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

See also

  • Military Keynesianism
  • The Ground Truth, a 2006 documentary film about veterans of the Iraq War
  • We Are Many, a 2014 documentary film about the February 2003 global day of protest against the Iraq War
  • Protests against the Iraq War

References

  • Why We Fight official site at Sony Pictures Classics
  • at Now Playing magazine.