ReNe: why we fight

Oddly, we seem to be watching a lot of these kind of critical documentaries lately. Perhaps it's because watching one provides issues to ruminate upon, names to watch out for, and like browsing the net, making the jump from one film ('web-page link') to another gets easier. I told a colleague about watching The Corporation and he recommended Why We Fight.

Why We Fight, a film by Eugene Jarecki and released in 2005, looks at the anatomy of the American war machine. It starts off looking at 9/11 and the war that followed, but really, the Iraq war was just the latest in a long series of conflicts the US has been involved in all over the world since after WWII. It discusses the military-industrial complex or MIC, as first coined by former US president Eisenhower, and the planned rise of the 'American Empire'.

What was disturbing was the stupendous amount of outright lies spouted by the people in power (the US president and his team, the generals, the think-tanks) to the public. For example, they were saying things like, "the first strike in Iraq at Dora was successful and it was targeted so as to minimize collateral damage because we were using smart missiles", when actually no military people were killed in that attack (much less Saddam Hussein, the supposed target) and instead 15 civilians at Dora Farms (a farming community) were killed. Even the two pilots who flew that mission didn't really know what was going on; they were 'following instructions' and though they were not told what was they were attacking, they probably were ordered to take out some important military building.

During the first six months of the Iraq war, 50 precision air-strikes were conducted against Iraqi leadership. Of these strikes, none hit its intended target.

And of course, most famously, no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were ever found in Iraq (one of the supposed reasons for attacking Iraq in the first place). However, as one of the interviewees said it very well,

"We know that they have nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, because we have the receipts."

I recalled when the US attacked Iraq in 2003; I thought, all right, even if Iraq has WMDs, does that give the US the right to attack them? The reasons given, the so-called 'intelligence reports' linking the 9/11 attack to Al Queda didn't seem convincing, and the leap of logic to conclude that 'Iraq has WMDs and therefore we should attack Iraq', seemed rather unreasonably aggressive. But then, I am not a US citizen and I was not in the US at that time. An American friend was describing the scenes the day after 9/11: she was driving back from another city, trying quickly to get home, and there would be people on the bridges waving US flags and people displaying patriotic placards and just an amazing emotional fervor that was hard not to get caught up in.

And, like being given a rope to hang himself, there was actually a news clip of Bush actually saying,

"We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September the
eleventh... but what the vice-president said was...."

Another particularly famous quote from Bush, who said it with absolutely no sense of irony, in light of what the film reveals,

"If the war is forced upon us, we will fight with the full force of the US military and we will prevail."

(It should be, "And we will force our war upon others...")

But, as mentioned earlier, the film is not about the Iraq war, it's about the American war machine. If it's not Iraq, it's Vietnam. Or Cuba. Or Haiti. Or Yugoslavia. Or Iran. There is a long list of countries the US has invaded. This page also has a nice summary.

I was complaining to Mike that the trouble with this kind of critical documentary is that one ends up feeling angry, frustrated and helpless in the face of all these stupidity. Environmental issues on the other hand, I feel I can actually make a small but direct difference.

Still, it's a very good show. Go watch.