Five Minutes With
Eugene Jarecki
President Eisenhower, who made his name as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces during WWII, once said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed … This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
Why We Fight, a thoughtful and unflinching documentary by Eugene Jarecki, takes as its jumping off point President Eisenhower’s famed 1961 farewell address, in which he introduced the term “the military industrial complex” and warned against “the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” (An original draft of the speech used the phrase “military industrial congressional complex,” but the third word was stricken, apparently so as not to offend electeds.) The film focuses on the economic, ideological and political forces that shape America’s post-WWII drive to fight against a changing enemy and how that drive reshapes our democracy at home.
Though the film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, Jarecki initially had trouble securing funding or a hospitable U.S. media outlet, so he turned to the BBC, which first broadcast the documentary that he says was born of his “deep, tough love for my own country.”
The film, which was completed with access and approval from the Pentagon, features a dizzying array of insiders and outsiders. Participants include neocons like Richard Perle and William Kristol to “Imperial America” author Gore Vidal to highly critical Pentagon whistleblowers to a confused, rudderless young man who just lost his mother and then enlists in the military.
Campus Progress talked with Eugene Jarceki about the difference between mousetraps and B2 bombers, Pentagon euphemisms, and why we fight.
It is always easier to talk about problems instead of solutions. How do we move forward? Do you see a way in which America can dismantle this military industrial congressional complex that you talk about so much in the film?
The biggest fear I have is that people leaving the film might feel that I have a bleak outlook. But really, though the film’s information is challenging, I am quite hopeful that change is available. There have been dark chapters throughout human history, like the one we’re experiencing, and those chapters have been followed by periods of enlightenment.
I know many people were disillusioned that the protests prior to the Iraq War sort of did nothing to stop the war. I reject that notion because it’s very hard to know what impact something really has had until much time has passed. Once, someone asked Chou En-Lai, the Chinese foreign minister under Mao Tse-tung, what he thought of the French revolution, and he said “too soon to tell.” Americans are so accustomed to wanting quick results to everything, they want to have protests occur in the streets and the policy apparatus immediately turn on its heels and change, and the war gets stopped. And life doesn’t happen that way.
Basically, thirty million people marched in advance of the Iraq War before a single shot was fired. That’s around the world. If you take the analogous year before the Vietnam War, 1963, about twelve Quakers marched down 5th Avenue in New York City. So I do think there has been a tremendous development in awareness. Just like the protests helped inspire my film, things will start to feed on themselves, and in that darkness, we will find some greater light.
But what do we do with that energy? When you have certain weapons with parts manufactured in practically every state in the U.S., the military industry becomes inextricably tied up with political decision making. So how do we begin to address some of these problems on a political level?
If you and I were going to start a company and make mousetraps, it would be most efficient to make them all under one roof, right? That way all the workers can have lunch together, we can use one air conditioner, pay one set of taxes, get incentives – all those economies of scale. But that’s not how the defense business sees it, because they’re not only interested in making mousetraps, but in making sure that they can keep being able to make mousetraps. They need to create a process that is resistant to change, even when they are offering outmoded weapons – like the B2 bomber – that may not be the best tool in meeting the new threat of non-state terrorist actors. So they make sure that everyone is getting a piece of the action, and that will make Congress very quiet. They’ve been bought off with desperately needed jobs for their own districts.
In his farewell speech, Eisenhower said, “the power of money is ever-present and is gravely to be regarded.” We see the potentially poisonous influence of money that makes Congress answerable not to each man equally but to some more than others. How do you stop that? How do we stop democracy from becoming imperiled at the hands of capitalism? Well, it’s very hard, but it’s doable.
The public needs to start demanding greater transparency in campaign finance. The campaign finance reforms that Mr. McCain and Mr. Feingold have valiantly put forward is a step in the right direction. Jefferson once described the need for a “wall of division” between capitalism and democracy. Campaign finance reform is one brick, not the whole wall.
At one point in the film, Gore Vidal says that during WWII, the Japanese wanted to surrender before the atomic bomb was dropped and that Eisenhower didn’t want to drop it but Truman did, in part because he wanted the opportunity to flex American muscle in the face of the oncoming cold war. What was some of the evidence that you encountered that supported that big charge?
The claim has two parts, and it is meant to give people greater texture in understanding the historical significance of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is evidence – through broken Japanese code during the war and entries in Truman’s diaries – that suggest that the Japanese were interested in conditional surrender and the Americans were seeking unconditional surrender.
The darker part of the claim, that has been contested back and forth by historians, is the idea that there was some other motivation to dropping those bombs than simply ending the war with Japan. It is known that there was a conversation between [Secretary of State] Jimmy Burns and Truman in which the idea arose that they had spent so much money on the Manhattan Project, if they didn’t do something to show something for it at the end of the war, they were gonna be chased out of town. So there’s sort of the haunting notion of an early military-industrial economic pressure on proper decision making.
That is furthered in a series of private meetings Truman has where he is advised that the Japanese are looking for surrender, but they are looking to do so through Russia, as a kind of intermediary, and Mr. Truman does not want them to seek peace through Russia, because it would empower Russia. He would prefer to see it through a smaller, more neutral power. So part, and I only say part because I don’t want to end up in the extremity of historical revisionism—of Mr. Truman’s decision is inspired by wanting to fire a pre-emptive warning shot across the bow of our impending greatest rival.
In the film you speak with several Iraqis about the civilian casualties that accompanied the first strikes on Iraq on March 19, 2003. They painted a picture that certainly didn’t match what we heard in the mainstream media. The issue of “collateral damage” never became the big, hot-button media issue it could have been. What do you think the relationship is between the media and the militaristic American ideology that you argue is so prevalent?
Let’s look at an example. In advance of the war in Iraq, the Pentagon has people whose job it is to come up with a euphemistic, operational name for their plans. And in this case, it turned out to be Operation Iraqi Freedom. (There’s been some speculation that it was once Operation Iraqi Liberation but that acronym spells O.I.L., and that was awkward.) Now the top networks, five of them, all referred to their coverage of the war as “Operation: Iraqi Freedom” on their commercials, their logo-ing, their tickertape insignias at the bottom of the screen. But Operation Iraqi Freedom is an opinion—it was a prediction on how the war would result.
When the major media networks (private enterprises, all) name their coverage the same name as the Pentagon’s own chosen euphemism for the war, than you have to ask yourself how would it be any different in a nation with a state-controlled media?
Moreover, individual journalists are suffering as well in this current environment. Many have found that, unfortunately, a kind of matrix has taken hold around them that links job security to how and what they report. And it’s because of the phenomenon of access. If you want to climb the ranks as a journalist you need to get scoops. And to do that you need to build relationships with insiders. Let’s say that insider is Mr. Rove. Well, he is smart enough to know that if you only write puff pieces about him, you’ll lose credibility. You won’t be a useful tool. So, what he really wants is for you to establish an identity in the media landscape that is rigorous and critical, but, in fact, deep down you know not to go too far and displease him too deeply. Because next time he has information, he’ll go to someone else. And so, your career mobility has been affected, inappropriately, by your willingness to cross a line and dig deeper.
It’s interesting how now, decades after Eisenhower, a Republican, first used the term “military industrial complex,” the term is viewed by some as an overwrought, sort of ‘60s lefty hippie throwback and not as something rather prescient.
Well, I think Eisenhower’s warning needs to be correctly understood. When Eisenhower warned about the military industrial complex, he was not articulating a conspiracy theory. He was giving an analysis of the danger that faces our society, a republican society, if it tilts toward militarism. His fear was moving towards empire, towards a standing army, towards living in perpetual fear and readiness instead of a republic that can improvise defense when attacked, beat their plowshares into swords as the Bible says.
Eisenhower’s genius was that he was deeply aware that national defense is about more then just bombs. That you need education because an uneducated people cannot even run the machines of war. That you need health care because an unhealthy people is ultimately undefended. That you need infrastructure for when mother nature challenges you. Those who may wish us ill overseas and turned on their televisions to see the ravages of Katrina must have had a small moment of comfort watching how unprepared America was for that kind of scenario.
Eisenhower was, at one point, president of Columbia University and a staunch supporter of access to higher education. Is there a role for college students in this whole debate?
In his farewell address, Eisenhower talked about the free university which is what he called the fountainhead of free ideas. He said that the free university in America was being threatened in its purity by the same forces he was concerned about on the national level. He saw college kids as the country’s most important line of defense for keeping these forces in check, and if you lost that, then there goes the neighborhood. So, we’ve established an educational outreach arm called the Eisenhower Project that is dedicated to bringing Eisenhower’s concerns to universities. We’re working with student chapters to follow the money that is being invested in universities by the defense sector and looking at the impacts of those monies on university curriculum and priorities. We’re also looking at the way university endowments are reinvesting back into the defense sector.
Clearly, you came to this film with a story to tell. Were there aspects of your research that ended up being particularly surprising to you?
Anyone who tells you – as a documentary maker or as any other artist – that their work is objective is lying. I know that I come at something with certain preconceived notions as we all do. And so it was really interesting to meet Wilton Sekzer and hear how he not only served his country as a soldier and then a policeman for his city, but he then lost his son on 9/11. He wanted revenge in a real way. And those of us who were concerned about the path to war in Iraq felt uncomfortable with the kind of culture of revenge being promoted by Washington, and so the notion of revenge became distasteful. But when you meet someone who has lost his son in 9/11 you understand how very natural that impulse toward revenge is and you can no longer sustain your convenient armchair assumption.
To learn more about the Eisenhower Project, visit www.whywefight.com or call (212) 352-3060.
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