by SARAH ROWLAND

When it comes to anti-war docs, who better to cast as your villain than a Republican warmonger? And that’s exactly what Eugene Jarecki did with his 2002 film, The Trials of Henry Kissinger, an investigative probe into the alleged war crimes committed by the notorious U.S. diplomat. For his follow-up project, however, Jarecki broke lefty protocol and made none other than former Repulican President Dwight Eisenhower the hero. The result is Why We Fight.

Though vastly different in scope, according to Jarecki the latter film could not have happened without the former. For if the New York filmmaker hadn’t been digging up dirt on Kissinger, he probably wouldn’t have come across Eisenhower’s foreboding 1961 Farewell Address to the nation. And what a chilling speech it was. Where most presidents use their last few moments in office to pat themselves on the back, Eisenhower chose instead to warn Americans that they need to keep a check on what he referred to as the “military-industrial complex” (in other words, the incestuous love-in between the weapons industry, military empire, congress and the scariest of them all: the special interest think tanks). If they didn’t, Eisenhower predicted, this ever-expanding war machine would one day be more powerful than whatever schmoe the voters elected as their Commander-in-Chief—be it a Democrat or a Republican.

“I found it arresting,” says Jarecki, who sat down with the Mirror for a one-on-one at his hotel lounge. “The fact that he had the honesty and courage to do that and the depth of understanding to do that—that was new. I had never seen an American president demonstrate any of those qualities in my lifetime. So it started me thinking: to what extent has what he warned us about come true?”

Investigating imperialism

Well, according to Why We Fight, all of it came true. Jarecki looks back over the last half century at how economic imperialism has been the driving force behind every U.S. invasion. We meet several retired military officials talking about the fabricated leap in logic that led to the Baghdad bombing, the clueless pilots who dropped said bombs, factory workers who build the bombs, and in one particularly eerie onscreen moment, a Republican senator who has to cut his interview short because the omnipresent Vice President is on the phone.

As frightening and downright depressing as the film is at times, Jarecki insists it’s not meant to discourage viewers from taking an active role in political change.

“This is an effort to fundamentally fix things that are terribly and tragically flawed about the American system and repair very deep fractures that have occurred over time. And that’s not a casual undertaking. I think of it as a Star Wars episode where you’re trying to battle the empire on behalf of the republic—that’s my calling.”

But will it make a lick of difference?

“I think so. Though people need to keep in mind that shutting down a war machine isn’t like ordering fast food and Americans, especially, want everything instantly,” he says, referring to critics who point out that the U.S.-led war on Iraq continues—this despite all the celebrity-led Fahrenheit 911 hype.

“What effect did they want? Did they actually expect to take a force of greater momentum than perhaps any in the history of the world, short of a tsunami, and shut it down overnight?

“Political movements take decades, sometimes centuries. So every move we make counts, every film we make counts. We may not see the effect of it right away. But we have to have patience.”

Moore or less

While Jarecki champions Michael Moore’s efforts, he has gone out of his way to make a different kind of political doc. The most obvious distinction being that he’s not on camera at all.

“I’m a comfortable, white, pudgy American,” he says as he scoffs down the rest of his fries and orders another soda. “I’m not near the war. It’s not gonna touch me like it touches other people. So to put myself in there would be some jive pretense that I’m part of the situation I’m filming.

“And I couldn’t imagine looking back 20 years from now and thinking ‘I meant to do a movie about the system—what am I doing there?’”

That is not to say that Jarecki has made a completely unbiased documentary. “I’m in my film in the sense that my camera is there and the subjectivity of the film is definitely mine, but the notion of watching my ugly face for 20 or 30 per cent of the movie, or even five, would just seem like a distraction from the enormity of the subject.”

He also tries to show both sides of the argument—if such a thing is possible. For instance, for almost every accusation that Dick Cheney has made millions from the Iraqi war by granting government contracts to his pals at Halliburton, Jarecki cuts to a neo-conservative like Richard Perle denying the allegations. These interview clips are pretty comical stacked up against the mountain of evidence stating otherwise, but at least they give the appearance of balanced reporting.

“That may have cost me some friends,” he says. “There are a lot of people who would rather a film like this to be a witch hunt. They’re angry, they’re desperate and they feel alienated from a political process that brought the world into an extremely insecure position over the last few years.

“So they want moments of barbed humour, they want moments of vicious retaliation and they want people to be made fools of. But to me, that is politically impotent behaviour because it keeps you in a never-ending duality with your opposition and it relegates you to being the permanent tat to someone else’s tit.”

Purple reign

Jarecki’s hope? Only that Why We Fight, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, will end the present ping-pong debate between Republicans and Democrats. “I’m trying to introduce a kind of political dialectic that doesn’t reach across the aisle; it blows the whole aisle up.”

In fact, he is so dead-set on not being associated with any one party that he refused to premiere his film before the 2004 Bush/Kerry showdown.

“I reject this whole notion that America is a red and blue country,” he says referring to Princeton’s post-election study which concluded that when the Democratic/Republican divide is broken down town by town (as opposed to state by state), the U.S. political map is not as red and blue as we think it is.

“It’s actually a purple country,” he says. “But there are devices and forces in America trying to separate us into red and blue and I will not do anyone the favour by letting my film fall into that same trap. So it’s a purple film, made for purple people to have a purple conversation about a world that never was red and blue. And people who can’t accept that will be stuck forever in a party game, while the real decisions are being made by the grown-ups in the other world—and that is the real danger.”

Why We Fight opens Friday, March 24

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