Why We Fight

This new, extremely timely and urgently relevant documentary, impressively backed by the BBC’s Storyville strand, takes on no less a shadowy target than the US military-industrial complex. Once upon a time (1961 to be exact), the world was such that the US president himself, the then-departing Eisenhower, was the one to warn of the threat to national security posed by a permanent arms industry. Now Jarecki explores the ongoing legacy of just such a build-up, by weaving together insider testimony, historical footage and the avowedly personal narratives of participants, in the process revealing how the drive to invade Iraq was a triumph of corporate Capital’s ideological influence on political and strategic decision-making. The film won Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize in January, welcome homeland evidence of dissent from the line currently being pursued by a very different White House incumbent.