Has anyone else seen this documentary? The title is not search-friendly, but I don’t find anything searching with the director’s name within the past 6 months, except my own post in The Pit last month, dicussing how I’d first heard about it while listening to an NPR podcast interview (snippet and full transcript of the interview are available in the linked post).
I just saw it today, and I’m interested in what others think.
I saw it about a week ago. (Full disclosure: I work for one of those defense contractors mentioned.) I was pretty meh; not bad or factually objectionable, but really lacking any bite or revelation. Although Jarecki clearly had an axe to grind, I didn’t find it terribly biased–certainly not in the sense that Michael Moore “documentaries” are–but he did seem to limit his talking heads to the obvious targets; on the “pro” side were the standard neocons like Bill Kristol, and on the anti we get McCain, both saying the same things that they’ve always been saying. Defense contractors cozying up to the Pentagon? Get off! Congressmen supporting large corporations that offer jobs in their districts? Nah, get real. Cheney has a vested interest in seeing Halliburton profit? Say it isn’t so! I’m a little surprised they didn’t trot out the infamous $600 hammers.
I found virtually nothing in the film to be any kind of surprise, or even a new take on an old issue. I was hoping it would go more into detail in why the US does and is expected to engage in military adventurism, and how this ties into our desire to maintain a large “military-industrial complex”, but the filmmaker barely touched on this other than to rail against the current mess in Iraq. Only a side mention of Grenada, no mention of the invasion of Panama, nor of maintaining Marines in Beruit or our massive permament presence in South Korea or Okinawa. Surprisingly, given the root material, he didn’t even get all that deep into Eisenhower’s functionalist relationship with the military while President or into his foreign policy, which largely consisted of a preference for covert action and support rather than adventurism and occupation.
One odd omission is a virtual non-mention of Robert McNamara, who was probably the single most significant Secretary of Defense, who presided (if reluctantly, as it turns out) over the expansion of the war in Southeat Asia and regularly fought against what he viewed was waste and unnecessary expense in defense spending. This oversight is peculiar because McNamara is an ideal avatar for the co-dependent relationship the US government has with defense contractors; like Eisenhower, McNamara had extensive experience in the planning and logistics of large strategic operations, and like Ike, he saw the value in maintaining a military posture but was concerned about maximizing efficiency and not supporting programs for the sake of effective corporate welfare. But the film barely mentions McNamara, which is a bit like trying to avoid the elephant in the room, at least with respect to the Sixties and Viet Nam.
Fortunately, Errol Morris has an excellent documentary (The Fog Of War) which is essentially an extended interview of McNamara. (In fact it started as an interview for Morris’ First Person PBS show, but he found the topic so interesting and McNamara so engaging and effacing that he filmed over 20 hours of footage.) While McNamara then refused to comment directly on the actions of the current Adminstration (though he has since spoken up critically: see “It’s Just Wrong What We’re Doing”) he makes a number of key points about military buildup and foreign operations that apply directly to the Gulf War II and other recent engagements. More interetsingly, Morris gives McNamara’s statements a historical context by going into his personal and professional history. In the film, McNamara becomes his own (if not worst) critic; he concedes that “we were acting like war criminals” (during the firebombings of Japanese cities) and admitting that “we were wrong.” Many criticisms have been made of McNamara’s duplicity, which may or may not be valid, but the lessons he draws from his experience are both fascinating and, IMHO, on point.
Why We Fight just didn’t seem to have much of a punch. Anybody who found it really shocking or illuminating probably hasn’t been watching the news for the past few years. It seems to exist mostly for the sake of preaching to the choir. I can’t say that it’s wrong in the claims it presents, but it doesn’t reveal or highlight anything previously unsuspected.
Stranger
Which one? Are they hiring? (Email in profile.)
I had a customer strongly reccomend it. It’s playing at Cinequest here in San Jose.
I personally didn’t learn anything new either, other than the apparent fact that people are MUCH less inclined to see and/or discuss this film compared to F. 9/11, which I don’t quite get.
But similar to how I feel while “not learning anything new” when watching documentaries with a axe to grind about wildlife and habitat conservation, I’m glad I saw it, and I’m glad that it brought my attention back to the things that bother me about the status quo.
That’s the thing about the status quo. It usually has significant momentum and is floated along with dogma, conditioning, programming, and propaganda.
One take home message, for me, was that the combination of the “MIC” and the thinktanks are now such an accepted part of the background noise that US society has a hard time contemplating them, let alone quantifying or qualifying them.
I shouldn’t need a documentary to point out why the US does these things, or why we maintain huge standing armies. Yet I personally don’t have a solid answer of my own, and I doubt that the majority of citizens do either, regardless of how solid they might think their answers might be. It is a troubling disconnect to continuously perceive such a huge discrepancy between what is known (or believed) by our leadership and what is known (or believed) by our citizens.
I do have suspicions. I personally feel that the majority of the motivation the US has to “police the globe” it is greed-driven imperialism masked as the “liberating-free-trade-capitalist-democracy” that we’ll benefit from with enough trickle down economics left over to “improve” lives across the rest of the globe.
While digesting the film I found myself concentrating not on Bush-bashing or railing against our presence in Iraq, but trying to imagine how we could ever get out of this MIC business we’re in. How many administrations would it take? If the system were somehow able to self-repair with respect to corruption, and a competent and popular candidate were elected President, and people actually turned out for elections and got more involved with their elected officials, would we even make a dent in the status quo within 8 years? 16? 50?
There was a Why We Fight series shot during WWII. I didn’t know there was a new production with that name.
This is a documentary that takes its title from the series of films.
Well, such “think tanks” like Kristol’s Project for a New American Century are essentially marketing organizations that take up the cause of some political viewpoint and formulate strategies for selling them to the American public; in essense, they have largely taken over from the government the funciton of generating propaganda. The worrisome aspect is the amount of influence they have over politicians and executives, particularly ones who are so simple-minded as to not have a clear understanding or direction themselves. But while the political influence of these so-called “think tanks” (not to be confused with systems analysis groups like the RAND Corporation) is something fairly recent–from the mid-Eighties onward–the disinfranchisement of the voting public isn’t anything new, and indeed, it is hard to find a time in the history of the US when the voting public wasn’t swayed significantly by some small but highly influential group, be it the Hearst News empire, the War Department Propaganda Wing, McDonalds, or PNAC. “Wagging the dog” is hardly a new phenomenon.
While I think there is some truth in this, I suspect that you are oversimplifying. There exists among other nations of the world (at least, when the US isn’t busy unilaterally overthrowing other nations) that the US should and has a responsibility to intervene. You may (or may not, as it was not highly publicized by domestic news agencies) the fevrent criticism of the failure of the US stop genocide in Rwanda and Yugoslavia. The US is expected, at least by some, to enforce a pax americana on the globe. It’s sort of like inveighing the local bully to protect you in exchange for a cut of your lunch money. And note that defense contractors don’t just sell their products domestically; a large portion of sales profits come from foreign customers. This, of course, has to be approved by the American government, so there is a confluence of interests, and thus influence.
It’s not clear that, so long as we are the dominant economic superpower, that we can or even should get out of “the business.” Being “strong” on defense is always a good sell to the American public–it’s what Reagan rode high on, and people still have the perception that somehow Reagan personally revitalized the American military, which is a somewhat dubious claim–and of course it’s big business; one that sucks up the single largest line item of the tax base, but also provides fairly steady employment for hundreds of thousands of civilian workers plus a government-run job training/service organization for members of the military which provides dividends (in the form of education and experience) to the nation as a whole.
You could argue that the same funds could be used more profitiably on more peaceful activities, like massive civil works programs or large-scale technological developments like energy research or transportation improvements, but such programs are a hard sell on a continuous basis. Just look at the criticism that is still levied against FDR’s New Deal, despite its manifest value to a nation in the throws of the Depression (and the infrastructure and educational benefits therefrom). Being “strong on defense” has allowed us to develop many of the technologies that serve us today; for instance, the Manhattan Project (which advanced nuclear research by a couple orders of magnitude in funding and interest) or the SAGE system (which was never strategically viable but laided the groundwork and developed the technology that ultimately led to the Internet).
Waste is, unfortunately, a part of the system, perhaps intrinsically. So is influence over both politicians and the voting public; the former welcomes the kind of direction and support it gains from large, cohesive entities, and the latter appreciates having the burden of researching and understanding all issues lifted from it in favor of following along with whatever ideology seems most popular at the time. Democracy–the notion of each man (and woman) voting their own mind–assumes that people actually want control and responsibility, an unlikely proposition for most.
These are the issues I was hoping the film would get into. Instead, (I felt) it kind of tap-danced around them and wagged its finger at defense contractors and politicians. Strikingly, though, people almost never vote down the candidate that calls for more defense, and certainly not one who promises (and delivers on the same) to bring more jobs to the district. It seems to be that the real danger isn’t the “military-industrial complex” itself–which doesn’t really care whether we go to war or not, so long as we keep it in money and toys to play with–but that the existence of its products combined with an executive who is not sufficiently reluctant to exercise force and not versed in the effects of doing so unilaterally may lead to a inflammatory situation. It’s like putting a loaded gun in the hand of an angry kid; it’s the kid that’s dangerous, but the possession of the gun makes him effortlessly deadly.
Stranger
Do we maintain a huge standing army?
I guess I’m not familliar with comparative troop strengths of other nations, but we don’t seem to have very many active frontline troops. Isn’t the army overstrained by even the modest demands we’re making these days?
My impression is that we maintain a huge technological and contrxacting investment, and a huge (if skeletal) support infrastructure, but that the actual boots-on-ground army is not all that large.
Sailboat
The Army (that is, the active “Regular Army”, the Army Reserve, and the National Guard) comprises a total of about 1.1 million bodies. In proportion to our population that isn’t so large, especially compared with nations that have compulsary service, but bear in mind that our per-solider spending is by far the highest in the world, and this to maintain an army that has effectively no domestic borders to defend, nor any nominal colonial interests to protect. We maintain a force of ~30,000 troops in the Republic of Korea (South), for instance, as well as keeping bases of various services in different areas of the world. This obviously has much more to do with commerce than protection of national security.
The situation in Iraq can hardly be characterized as a “moderate demand”; although they’re only about 25% of peak Viet Nam War peak levels, the actual cost is much greater per solider, and these are volunteers, not conscripts and felons.
Stranger
Stranger makes an excellent point here: that it’s not just that the U.S. maintains one of the three largest armies in the world (next to Russia and China, IIRC), but that it does so in the face of a laughable need for ground forces for self-defense. Canada obviously ain’t gonna attack, and Mexico has been rated among the least combat capable armies in the world, not to mention that it’s army is a fifth the size of America’s.
The large U.S. standing army is a condition in American history unique since 1945; before the U.S. only needed a large navy to maintain security. The army exists not for U.S. defense, but for the defense of U.S.-friendly governments such as South Korea, and for the defense of ‘American interests’ overseas, whatever those may happen to be. On the one hand it gives the U.S. a capability to intervene in conflicts anywhere in the world, while on the other hand it provides the opportunity to breed resentment when we meddle where no one else does.