Tuesday, November 24, 2009 By Daniel Edgren

Why do we fight? Eugene Jarecki knows

I recently saw one of the timeliest and most insightful films I probably will ever see for a very long time. It wasn't just the twists, although there were plenty of those—this is political commentary, after all—or the soundtrack—which was amazing—or even the appearance of Chalmers Johnson, who taught my father political science at UC Berkeley. No, director Eugene Jarecki's brilliance stems from his pulling the truth out from under our noses and whacking us over the head with it for not noticing it sooner. He makes us realize something we've known all along but never cared to confront: American foreign policy has been hijacked. And not by terrorists wielding boxcutters or AK-47s.

No, it's the men in black.

Why We Fight makes the case that the infamous military-industrial complex influences government action to the point where politicians will lie and convince citizens to go to war to fill the coffers of defense contractors. Richard Cheney and Haliburton are prime examples of this--and for good reason. Interviews with an independent worldwide fact-finding audit reveal that, during the 1990's, while Cheney was Secretary of Defence, the Pentagon contracted KBR, Inc. to investigate the feasibility of the Defense Department hiring private contractors. KBR is a subsidiary of Haliburton. Bottom line: Cheney hired a private contractor to tell the Pentagon the country should use private contractors.

The film takes its name from a series of WWII propaganda films, many directed by Frank Capra, designed to convince the nation, only just shrugging off the first vestiges of isolationism, to throw its full might behind a worldwide war effort on two fronts. Its purpose then is seen as analogous to how policy-makers today strive to convince us that war is necessary.

Jarecki does fail in providing an informed military perspective. He harshly criticizes the use of so-called precision-guided ordnance (aka "smart" bombs) in the Middle East, rolling out numerous instances and statistics clearly displaying the ineffectiveness of these weapons' guidance packages. In one instance, several GPS-guided bombs are dropped on a structure housing several key Iraqi officials during the invasion. Post-run recce indicates all the weapons hit.

Enter the United States Marines. And embedded reporters.

The world watches—live—as CNN pans around the compound "hit" by the coalition airstrike. It's untouched. Every bomb fell outside the wall surrounding the building, the closest landing right next to, but still outside of, the wall. The proof was in the puddles forming at the bottom of the craters: "precision" is still fantasy.

I've never disputed this, nor (to the best of my knowledge) have any knowledgeable service people. To quote Virginia-based independent think-tank GlobalSecurity.org: “Videotapes of LGBs precisely traveling down ventilator shafts and destroying targets with one strike, like those televised during and after Desert Storm, can easily create impressions about the effect of a single LGB on a single target, which was summed up by an LGB manufacturer's claim for effectiveness: ‘one target, one bomb.’” Jarecki's right in that the risk of "collateral damage" was criminally downplayed by politicians to the American people when Rumsfeld and the White House were beating their war-drums. But the military's never pretended otherwise. The figure I'm constantly hearing from testing of new guidance packages for bombs is 10 meters--that is, the closest a weapon will impact a target is 10 meters on any given drop. TV-guided weapons (i.e. missiles) are much more accurate and usually controlled by the aircraft that fires them. You may recall the declassified grainy black-and-white footage the news would air from weapons closing in on targets. They're designed to hit, among others, moving targets like tanks, and, obviously, missing a T-72 by 10 meters does no one any good at all.

But GPS-, radio-, and laser-guided ordnance aren’t so accurate. Don't get me wrong, we've made plenty of progress since WWII, but we have not yet reached the point where we can bomb urban theatres of war indiscriminately. Civilian casualties will always be present and should, as Jarecki says, be much more present in our considerations concerning mobilizing to fight.

Overall, Jarecki gets it right and provides critical warning for our future. It's wise we heed him.