In describing Eugene Jarecki’s extraordinary documentary, Why We Fight, it is not enough to say that the filmmaker did his homework. Nor is it enough to say that Jarecki simply “gets it” or “understands” or “knows what he’s talking about,” all impressions that linger resonantly enough when you view his film or listen to the director elaborate on its thematic trinity of war, economics and imperialism.
Rather, Jarecki sort of absorbed his homework, so much so that Why We Fight virtually revels in a cold, burnished knowledge that possesses all of the answers while–despite its pedigree (Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning documentary) and authority (interviews with Sen. John McCain, William Kristol, Gore Vidal, exhaustive research, etc.)–having none. After all, the film implies, we fight because fighting is necessary.

Ike has a complex in Eugene Jarecki’s documentary Why We Fight (Photo: Sony Pictures Classics)
Or is it? “One of the things that happens is that a viewer comes into Why We Fight, and sees that tremendous amount of effort to think reflectively about the question of the title, which is so desperately important to all of us,” Jarecki told The Reeler. “I think that if a viewer walked out and felt that the film thought it knew the answer, or that Eugene’s voice was too clear and ringing out too loudly, they would be terribly disappointed. It would act as though a question as far reaching and as complex as why we fight is just simple to answer. If it were simple to answer, then it it would simple to stop fighting. The point is that we keep fighting, and we fight for reasons. We fight because we are victims as human beings–we are victims of forces far larger and more complex than we were led to believe.
“And so the only consistent answer in Why We Fight is that though there is no one answer why we fight the current war or why we have fought past wars, what is true of all the wars is that there is a terrible and tragic gap between what the public is told and what turns out later to truly have been going on behind closed doors. So we are never really fighting for the reason at the beginning, and we find ourselves all too often as we are now: Deep in the quicksand of the war, scratching our heads wondering, ‘How did we get here again?’ ”

Though Why We Fight takes its name (and some images) from Frank Capra’s series of World War II-era propaganda films, it draws its thesis from President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address. Probably the quintessential American war hero of the 20th century, Eisenhower nevertheless presaged the evolution of a “military-industrial complex” that threatened to hijack American foreign policy in its quest for empire. Eisenhower coined the phrase; it has since entropied into a pitch-black abstraction through which the United States embroils itself in one armed conflict after another.
Jarecki stumbled on the footage four years ago while researching his last documentary, The Trials of Henry Kissinger. The idea that an Army man of Eisenhower’s stature would invoke something as sinister as a “military-industrial complex” on his way out of two ostensibly successful White House terms captivated the filmmaker. “It was absolutely jaw-dropping,”he said. “I don’t think before or since an American president has spoken that candidly to the American public. On any subject, let alone one of such life-and-death significance. And let alone one that was so dear to the president, having been a general himself.”

The potential for change was central to Jarecki’s conception of Eisenhower, and it became Why We Fight‘s leitmotif as well. In particular, between the intransigent neoconservative prattle of Richard Perle (right) and the reactive rhetoric of Dan Rather, Jarecki featured parts of his chat with a retired New York police officer named Wilton Sekzer, whose son Jason died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Bereft, outraged and resolute, Sekzer backed President Bush’s plan to avenge America’s losses in Iraq–the country to which the president and his Cabinet had established connections to al-Qaida and 9/11. Such was Sekzer’s thirst for payback that he sought out military personnel who would write Jason’s name on a bomb meant for Iraq; it symbolized a contemporary twist on the tactics loved ones would request in Sekzer’s days as door gunner in Vietnam.
Not long after the Air Force granted Sekzer’s wish over Baghdad (with photographic proof, no less), the president distanced himself from his previous Iraq-9/11 link. Nearly three years on, Sekzer remains incredulous. “We’re fighting an enemy that isn’t responsible for what we’re fighting for,” he said last week. “And I’m a hawk. I’m a person who wants to believe that my president walks on water. I want to believe that the leadership of this country can do no wrong. That when he says something, it’s something you can depend upon. He’s the president. … And when your government lies to you, it’s a punch in the heart, you know? It’s really, like, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ ”
And while Sekzer claims a new understanding of the Iraq War, its foundation in personal change and national uncertainty provides the mine for Why We Fight’s richest material. “We” alone confers a unity undergirding the legends of America’s great military triumphs. The “we” of Frank Capra’s own Why We Fight series was not limited to the Allied forces Eisenhower commandeered through Europe, nor their counterparts in the Pacific. In 1944, “we” meant “everybody”–war projected as a civil contract binding its populace to duty, obeisance or both.
Of course, America was threatened. But in the grand post-WWII hegemonic days, Jarecki’s revisionist “we” spotlights one nation under defense contractors, fueled by the Pentagon, immune to conscience. It also manages the miracle of irony without being even slightly cynical. Traveling around 30 states to ask his subjects why “we” fight, Jarecki said, he talked with regular citizens whose initial impulse often was to answer, “We fight for freedom.” But the conversations continued, and Jarecki would eventually ask a second time. “Suddenly,” Jarecki said, “a 9-year-old girl would know the word ‘Halliburton.’ ” Another, older interviewee answered more generally, “We fight for ideals–at least I hope so.” Consideration and thought–not pressure or ideology–motivated further change.
And Jarecki, who does not hesitate to deconstruct modern foreign policy by citing chapter-and-verse from other Eisenhower speeches, is a model of considerate, thoughtful, painstaking brilliance. James Wolcott’s breathless comparisons of Why We Fight to the later oeuvre of Michael Moore in February’s Vanity Fair in fact do a disservice to Jarecki; they may share politics (no matter how neutrally Jarecki purports to have approached Why We Fight), but where Moore tilts at windmills, Jarecki is dying to learn the source of Quixote’s dysfunction. Not that Jarecki would ever admit it.
Well, maybe a little.
“Every documentary maker today walking the planet at one pont or another gets the question about Michael Moore,” he told me. “In the wake of Michael Moore, there has been kind of a rising tide that has lifted all boats, and documentaries are being seen now in a new light. We hear all the time that there’s kind of a renaissance in documentaries. But much larger forces, I think, are at work that Michael Moore or any other single person. I think that what’s happening is that the documentary is being looked to increasingly to fill a void left by a collapse of public trust in mainstream journalism. And that basically the journalist is a person just like myself: Somebody who set out to uphold the ideals of an open society, and they got caught in a matrix just beyond their control where the same forces that Eisenhower warned us about–sort of runaway corporatism in America–are poisoning the fountainhead of free thinking that is supposed to be American journalism.”

Then Jarecki really got rolling. “I think there’s another interesting side component,” he said. “There was just kind of a coincidence in the past couple of years, which is that right when the world was becoming far more complicated and the public was sensing that needed to understand it that much more clearly–right at that time, thanks to the forces of corporatism in media, there was a collapse of trust in the source we usually turn to. So all of the sudden, people need to get their information from somehwere else. So we’ve seen the rise of the blogosphere. We see the rise of peer to peer communications on the Internet, and we see the rise of documentaries because the public has spoken. The public has made clear that contrary to what we were told–that girls just wanna have fun–people have an appetite for truth. And truth is often more interesting than fiction, it can be stranger than fiction, and at this point in human history, it may be far more necessary than fiction.”
But here is the thing: How do you reconcile the search for facts that you cannot find in mainstream media with the pursuit of nuance or “texture,” to borrow the word Jarecki has used in previous interviews? The answer, Why We Fight seems to say, is that nuance and texture are the closest living relatives to the truth. They are all we have, and neither liberals’ nor conservatives’ adherences to black and white ideologies are any longer tenable. More profoundly, Why We Fight not only illuminates the murky, necessary gradations from left to right, but also the vertical threads interweaving class, economics and politics. As proof, Jarecki offers Sekzer—the film’s symbol of the shellshocked American for whom the tragedy of 9/11 was revealed to be the ultimate cause and effect.
And the film’s struggle with real answers symbolizes the vacuum that Michael Moore and his stylistic heirs fill with a hybrid of introspection and bullshit. Why We Fight is pure introspection: the insight and humility of its director; the maddening complexity of American ethics; and the sharp, terrifying pain that the fight brings to its practitioners. Which is to say: All of us.
“I’m telling you,” Sekzer said, recalling his Vietnam service. “You cannot believe how terrible war is. You cannot believe it. You cannot believe how fragile the human body is. You can’t believe what a bullet or grenade or bomb will do to a human body–someone you were just talking to. So wouldn’t it be great if somehow or another, we could never go to war, we could force opposite groups to sit down at a table and discuss what’s wrong and hopefully come to a solution?
“Gee,” he adds, pausing with resignation. “Wouldn’t that be the greatest thing in the world?”

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