Why We Fight

[JaneMas]

Why We Fight is a documentary film directed by Eugene Jarecki that won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. The documentary was first released on January 17, 2006, exactly 45 years after Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address. It received a limited theatrical release on January 20, 2006. It was released on DVD to the home video market on June 27, 2006 by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, with a MPAA rating of PG-13.

The documentary is named after the World War II-era propaganda newsreels titled "Why We Fight," which had been commissioned by the United States.



The Military Industrial Complex

The term was first used publicly by President of the United States (and former General of the Army) Dwight D. Eisenhower in his Farewell Address to the Nation on January 17, 1961:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction...

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Eisenhower warns us of the military industrial complex

Synopsis

The film describes the rise and maintenance of the United States military-industrial complex while concentrating on wars led by the United States of the last fifty years and in particular on the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. It alleges that every decade since World War II, the American public has been told a lie to bring it into war to fuel the military-economic machine, which in turn maintains American dominance in the world. It includes interviews with John McCain, Chalmers Johnson, Richard Perle, William Kristol, Gore Vidal and Joseph Cirincione. The film also incorporates the stories of a Vietnam War veteran whose son died in the September 11, 2001 attacks and then had his son's name written on a bomb dropped on Iraq, a 23-year old New York man who enlists in the United States Army citing his financial troubles after his only family member died, and a former Vietnamese refugee who now develops explosives for the American military.


http://www.sonyclassics.com/whywefight/main.html

Raised in western North Carolina, Kwiatkowski began her military career in 1978 as a second lieutenant. She served at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska, providing logistical support to missions along the Chinese and Russian coasts. She served in Spain and Italy, and was then assigned to the National Security Agency (NSA), eventually becoming a speechwriter for the agency's director. After leaving the NSA in 1998, she became an analyst on sub-Saharan Africa policy for the Pentagon. Karen was in her office in the Pentagon when it was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. From May, 2002 to February, 2003, she served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia directorate (NESA). While at NESA, she wrote a series of anonymous articles, Insider Notes from the Pentagon, that appeared on the website of David Hackworth...

Her most comprehensive writings on the subject of the corrupting influence of the Pentagon on intelligence analysis leading up to the Iraq War appeared in a series of articles in The American Conservative magazine in December, 2003 and in a March, 2004 article on Salon.com. In the latter piece, titled "The New Pentagon Papers", she wrote:

I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president.

Kwiatkowski exposed how a clique of officers led by retired Navy Captain Bill Luti, assistant secretary of defense for NESA, and former aide to Dick Cheney when the latter was Secretary of Defense, took control of military intelligence, and how the "Office of Special Plans" (OSP) grew and eventually turned into a censorship and disinformation organism controlling the NESA.

1. Quotations
   
2. "I came to share with many NESA colleagues a kind of unease, a sense that something was awry. What seemed out of place was the strong and open pro-Israel and anti-Arab orientation in an ostensibly apolitical policy-generation staff within the Pentagon"
   
3. "Why we fight? I think we fight 'cause too many people are not standing up, saying 'I'm not doing this any more.'"
   
4. "If you join the United States military now, you are not defending the United States of America; you are helping certain policy-makers pursue an imperial agenda."
   
5. "At the end of the summer of 2002, new space had been found upstairs on the fifth floor for an "expanded Iraq desk." It would be called the Office of Special Plans. We were instructed at a staff meeting that this office was not to be discussed or explained, and if people in the Joint Staff, among others, asked, we were to offer no comment. We were also told that one of the products of this office would be talking points that all desk officers would use verbatim in the preparation of their background documents."
   
6. "By August, only the Pollyannas at the Pentagon felt that the decision to invade Iraq, storm Baghdad, and take over the place (or give it to Ahmad Chalabi) was reversible."
   
7. "It wasn't intelligence — it was propaganda. They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together."
   
8. "Interestingly, the Downing Street Memo is actually being reported by CNN and FOX News. It is being discussed in the major papers. Congress intends to examine it. Hearing it mentioned on the half hour by CNN Headline News has not dispossessed me of the belief that a state suicide is impossible. Thus, my gentle thoughts are increasingly turning to murder. Murder of the state. In self-defense, of course!"

On the Office of Special Plans:

"It's a propaganda office."