"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those that hunger and are not fed, those that are cold and are not clothed. This world is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
-Dwight Eisenhower,
Cross of Iron Speech - 1953
Forget the action movies and chick flicks of the summer! Why We Fight is a film by Eugene Jarecki I would highly recommend which is built off Eisenhowers
farewell speech from office which foreshadowed the military-industrial complex that exists today and its effect on why the US wages war. What makes this film so cool is that it does not have a partisan bent to it at all. It comes from a view of society that engulfs both political parties.
Playing heavily into film, besides Eisenhower, are WWII, Vietnam, 9/11 and the current war in Iraq. Among the interviewees are a former CIA analyst, two Dept of Defense analysts, William Kristol, Richard Perle, John McCain, Gore Vidal, ("we live in the united states of amnesia") and a father of a 9/11 victim.
An underlying theme to the film is how corporations and Congress manipulate the federal budget to sustain the military industrial complex through the flow of cash and revolving door of jobs between private and public sectors. By becoming so profitable, we are in a perpetual state of war and a bloated military establishment George Washington
warned against. Also examined are how almost all President's lie to get the desired outcome they want in war from Truman dropping the atomic bomb to Johnson with the Gulf of Tonkin to Bush II with WMD.
Some interesting points I found in the film:
-B2 bomber has parts made in every state so it makes it harder for Congress to kill the program
-McCain talking about Cheney's link to Halliburton and Cheney calls during the interview...ominous!
-The belief in precision bombing as opposed to what actual consequences are (ie, don't work as well as they say).
-Relation of US involvement with overthrow of Iranian gov't and how it built up Saddam Hussein
-How the Pentagon manipulates the news of the war through embedded reporting
Left or right, watch this film. It will get you thinking.
