Why We Fight: Award-Winning Film Comes to the Mountaintop

Documentary director Eugene Jarecki, director of the “The Trials of Henry Kissinger,” has hit a triple with his new film “Why We Fight,” which will have its Green Mountain State premiere this week-end at the Mountaintop Film Festival at the newly-refurbished Eclipse Theater in central Vermont’s Mad River Valley. Jarecki, who lives in Waitsfield with his wife Claudia Becker (now Eclipse Theater owner) and their two young children, will be on hand to answer questions about the making of the film, as well.

There are many compelling reasons why the Sundance Film Festival may have decided to bestow the Jury Prize on “Why We Fight” last year. Jarecki is a talented filmmaker, with a keen aesthetic sense (his celluloid mojo – lighting, camera work, sound, artistic delivery - makes a film like Robert Greenwalt’s recent “Wal-Mart” adventure look downright sloppy by comparison). He also is not afraid to serve up controversy. But instead of embracing subjectivity (again, think Greenwalt or the more rambunctious and annoying Michael Moore – we know who the good guys and bad guys are before we get within miles of the projection room), Jarecki strives for some modicum of balance. (Name another film where will you see war hawk Richard Perle and neoconservative Bill Kristol get the same amount of camera time as the curmudgeonly anti-imperialist Gore Vidal?). And Jarecki’s editing sense and production values are first-rate. Unlike other important documentaries like “The End of Suburbia,” which contains no fewer than 3 “false” endings, Jarecki superbly lays out his story, keeps his narrative trains running efficiently and on time, and arranges his voices in ways that compel.

Jarecki also tackles one of the thorniest questions of our time, a question to which, oddly enough, few people seem to have a ready answer.

Why do we fight?

The “we,” of course, is the United States. U.S. Us.

One would expect the answer to this question to be immediately obvious. After all, according to Jarecki’s film, the United States has a larger annual military budget than all 18 NATO member countries, Russia, and China combined. The U.S. spends more than a billion dollars on war weekly. And, of 191 U.N. member nations, the United States has a publicly-acknowledged military presence in 153 of them. The United States has become, in the words of former CIA insider-turned-critic Chalmers Johnson (who proves a steady voice of dispassionate reason in the film): the “New Rome.”

So, why do we fight? To “defend” ourselves from external threats? To depose foreign dictators and spread democracy? To unmask WMDs? To combat “terrorism” and the “terrorists” who allegedly (my word) attacked us unilaterally? To demonstrate U.S. military muscle globally? To establish consistent U.S. foreign policy doctrine, like the notion of “pre-emptive war”? (To put it in crude terms: we gotta “off” your peeps before you “off” us.) “What’s the big fuss about pre-emption?” asks Richard Perle in the film. “You’d shoot first if someone was planning to shoot you, right?”

Of course, it ain’t that simple, Dick. And Jarecki’s film steers into candid and controversial waters in exposing the cozy connections between the U.S. military-industrial complex’s major players: government elites (The Pentagon, the Executive Branch, and members of Congress), weapons-making corporations, arms dealers, the think tanks who get paid extravagant sums to serve up and distribute propaganda, and the corporate commercial media who serve as stenographic lapdogs for the powerful (Dan Rather has his moment in the sun in this film – finally – now that he is retired.)

And, unlike other films of the same ilk (Think “Hijacking Catastrophe” or “Fahrenheit 911), Jarecki provides more historical context, book-ending his film’s central question with outgoing Republican president and celebrated WWII hero Dwight Eisenhower’s famous 1961 “military-industrial complex” speech (beware the perils of the same, Ike famously warned) and the September 11, 2001 attacks, which injected new life into tired old rationales for war (the Commies had left the building by the 1990s) by providing new pretexts for the imperial invasion of other countries. He also sprinkles in a wide variety of short interviews and live footage (Can you say “Warren 4th of July parade, anyone?) with a wide array of impressive (and well-filmed) “talking head” commentaries, including real American heroes like Chalmers Johnson, the Center for Public Integrity’s Charles Lewis, and Pentagon whistleblower Karen Kwiatkowski (who has appeared in a number of post-911 films, and is at her best here.)

I was dissatisfied with the film, in some ways. In his quest for balance, Jarecki doesn’t aggressively go after some of the more ludicrous claims made by various power-brokering elites. And he is shrewd (or safely conservative) enough, I suppose, not to challenge our agreed-upon but patently absurd 911 mythology – 19 box-cutter wielding Muslim fanatics single-handedly hijacking 4 commercial airliners and catching the entire U.S. military-industrial-defense-intelligence complex with their collective pants down - though I hope that he will someday seek out the credible “conspiracy nuts” and take a good hard look at the evidence.

But there is something magisterial and haunting is this fine piece of film-making, as we hear a presidential voice intone that we in the United States “fight for principles of self-determination,” and realize that it is liberal Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson speaking of Vietnam more than forty years ago now, although now it sounds like only yesterday.

To see “Why We Fight,” visit www.mountaintopfilmfestival.com for more information.

Oil Flick: Hollywood’s Most Radical Film Of 2005

Director Stephen Gaghan’s gripping new film “Syriana” is not only one of the most compelling thrillers of the past decade. It is also Hollywood’s most radical film of the past year, an “art mirroring life” celluloid epic that explores the roots of 21st century civilization’s biggest dilemma: Peak Oil. Inexpensive fossil fuels – oil and natural gas – have floated both the corporately-controlled global economy and U.S. imperial planetary hegemony for the past several decades. Now, the party is over, as “elephant” fields like Kuwait’s Burgan are peaking, oil companies are maintaining sagging portfolios by buying up other companies’ reserves (real and fictitious), and the world begins to grasp the significance of living without immediate and inexpensive access to the 20th century’s most vital civilizational substance.

Perhaps “Syriana’s” biggest weakness (if one can call it that) is that Gaghan doesn’t pander to his audience. Instead, he seamlessly stitches together a complex and fast-moving narrative that tracks more than a dozen characters on four continents, assuming we know more about the way the world really works than we might.

So a little background is helpful. To fully appreciate “Syriana’s” storyline, understand that the world currently consumes 80 million barrels of oil a day, with the world’s richest and most powerful empire (that’s US) burning up 20 million of those barrels. Understand, further, that the United States reached “peak oil” (maximum domestic production capacity) in 1970, when it produced 10 million barrels of oil a day. Now, as U.S. supply dwindles, the country currently produce only 5 million domestic barrels a day (while consuming 20 million, remember), for a yearly consumption total of 7 billion barrels, while possessing only 700 million barrels (at maximum storage capacity) in strategic reserves. That leaves fifteen million barrels of oil the U.S. needs each day that we can’t produce ourselves. If oil-producing nations (say Iran or Venezuela) cut the U.S. off tomorrow, we’d have less than a year of oil and natural gas left.

Rather than give the oil-producing nations of the world that kind of power, U.S. based energy corporations (the fictional Connex and Killan corporations, who merge in “Syriana) and the U.S. government (now essentially the same entity, with Team Bush/Cheney/Condi/ Wolfy/Rummy running DC) have worked tirelessly during the past few decades to secure control over the world’s remaining fossil fuel reserves. (Make no mistake – under cover of a post-911 “war on terror,” the U.S. government is waging a sequential struggle to control the planet’s known remaining oil and natural gas reserves - Afghanistan and Iraq are but stepping stones to increased U.S. geo-strategic control over the greater Middle East).

The C.I.A. (represented in “Syriana” by George Clooney’s Bob Barnes, an agent who moves from true believer to angry skeptic) exists primarily to do the unpleasant but necessary work of funding Wall Street bankers and fueling U.S. imperial expansion by employing a wide variety of tools to ensure that the right deals are made by the right governments: drug smuggling, money laundering, weapons smuggling, election skullduggery, and assassination. Access and control of oil reserves is integral to their mission, as “Syriana” suggests.

And, as “Syriana” makes plain throughout the story, energy corporations and the U.S. government are doing this, not just to make huge profits, but to perpetuate the current oil-lubricated American way of life for as long as possible. Many of us may pay lip service to opposing Team Bush/Exxon/ Cheney/ Halliburton’s plans, but as long as we refuse to make a radical energy shift, we are complicit in this whole exercise. Without being heavy-handed or preachy, Gaghan reminds us of this in subtle ways throughout the film.

And, lest we get too cranky with ourselves, other powerful nations (China, with an economy exploding at an annual 10% rate, takes center stage in “Syriana”) are desperately looking for fuel, and the often-corrupt patriarchal emirs of Middle Eastern oil-producing nations are happy to sell, especially if it means enriching their own pockets and building their own palaces as part of the bargain. And what if a more enlightened desert despot (Prince Nasir in “Syriana) wishes to sell his country’s black gold to the highest bidder (say, China) to make possible a more democratic, tolerant and prosperous society for his own people? Declare him a terrorist (“communist” or “socialist” are so retro) and eliminate him.

“Everything is connected,” reads “Syrian’s tag line. Indeed it is. We also meet energy trader Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon), who ends up backing Nasir’s efforts to nationalize his country’s energy fields; Iranian and displaced oil worker-turned fundamentalist/terrorist Wasim Khan; investigative lawyer Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) and a host of other characters whose lives converge in one of the most provocative and true-to-life stories of our time.

“Syriana” is probably the closest Hollywood will ever come to presenting on honest picture of our Peak Oil dilemma. Don’t miss it.