Hey folks, Harry here... Ever since Toronto last year, Copernicus has been putting the bug in my ear about how awesome this documentary is - and coming up soon we're going to have the opportunity to see this sucker - and in tandem with that, Copernicus has put down the telescope and transcribed his interview for all of us to enjoy. The result is something, I feel is quite special. Here ya go...
What will probably be the most important documentary you see this year, WHY WE FIGHT, opens Friday. It tackles the tough question of why America gets itself into wars in the post-WWII era, taking the questions to characters as diverse as the neocons that agitated for the current Iraq war, to Senator John McCain, to the pilots that dropped the bombs to start the current Iraq war, to political scientists, to Iraqis, and to people who have resigned from the government after playing a part in the war machine. You can read my original review here, but the short version is that you owe it to yourself to see it. Director Eugene Jarecki was kind enough to sit down with me at the Toronto film festival and share his thoughts on the film and on the direction of foreign policy in America.
COPERNICUS: One of the most interesting ideas about the movie to me is that it shows how easy it is to start a war once you have a military industrial complex in place.
EUGENE JARECKI: I think the idea of that is that if you put a new car in the driveway and leave the keys in it, the kids are going to take it for a spin. Having what Dwight Eisenhower referred to as a permanent military establishment runs the risk that you too often have the tools for implementation at your fingertips. And when that is the case it eliminates one logistical barrier to the implementation of force. And when you remove barriers to implementing force you streamline the decision process from the halls of power to the battlefield. You make it that much easier to do it, you move that much more quickly. A beleaguered Congress has that much less time to think about what they have to think about. The public probably never even hears the true reasons. If you build it, it will work. That is the danger on that level, but there's far more danger about the permanence than that it just removes a barrier, it's also that it starts to take on a life of its own, and as Karen Kwiatkowski [a former member of the Pentagon's Iraq desk] says in her interview with me, if you are making bombs you need to have people blow up bombs to order new bombs.
How did you get started making the movie?
The last film I had made was also about US foreign policy, called THE TRIALS OF HENRY KISSINGER, about Henry Kissinger's role as an American statesman and about charges that had been levied against him regarding war crimes, and crimes against humanity, by journalists and jurists around the world. We were trying to get at the merit of those charges, because Dr. Kissinger was, as a powerful person in America, not making himself available to existing courts around the world who wanted his testimony on certain issues. And so all of a sudden the film became the place to unearth previously unearthed material about the truth of what happened. And I guess I caught the "truth bug" doing that film, where I wanted to know more, because I did not think that Henry Kissinger was in some way a villain any more than the system itself. When I went around with the Kissinger film and when I talked to audiences I was struck over and over by how much people were captivated by Henry Kissinger as a man, rather than looking through him at the system that employs him. They were very focused on "Had he done this, had he gone out with this woman, and had he done that?" That was unsettling to me because I really wanted to make a film about what makes the United States tick in these military misadventures like Vietnam. Once I saw how audiences were responding to that film, I vowed that whatever the next film I would make, it would look more deeply at the system itself, and not stop at the door at some patsy who is just a decision maker. Because the decision makers are replaceable, and had it not been Henry Kissinger it would have been someone else. But the machine has a life of its own.
It is interesting to me as an American who has moved to Canada, that in elections here people tend to talk more about the issues, whereas in the US, people tend to focus on the personalities of the politicians.
That's the funny thing – when we started out, that cult of personality that dominates US discourse… that inclination to be focused on the individual is something that we were trying to get past. And so when we decided to make the film we were very much making a film that was going to examine the system itself, and go deep into the halls of power, and try to penetrate into previously unpenetrated places, and learn. Then the war happened. Then you couldn't just make an abstract film about war, you had to deal with people. War is about people. People are on the receiving end of war, and people are on the giving end of war. And for me the way individuals are caught up in the war machine tells you so much more about the war machine that you can ever know in a classroom, ever know by talking to a public official who is trying to talk to you a certain way. Getting to talk to individual people whose stories would reveal so much about the American war experience was my goal. And so all of the sudden the film became a combination of a film of personal stories, like a "movie" movie, and another movie that is like a detective movie, a spy movie, trying to get at the truth of the matter. And so by bringing those two things together I actually ended up going back to the individual. Ultimately it is through the individuals' stories in the movie that you care. Even though I tried to escape Henry Kissinger and put the system on trial, the film does that, but it does that through the eyes of individual people whose lives are touched by the system so deeply.
For me, the most remarkable characters in the films are the people whose opinions started off one way, but then they came to realize that they were wrong. How did you find them?
We came at the characters in the film in very, very different ways. For certain characters we were given DoD approval from very early on to meet people within the military chain of command, and learn about their daily lives and what they were doing, what it was about for them. That's how we got to the two pilots who launched the opening strike on Baghdad. That's also how we got to the Secretary of the Air Force. That's also how we got to the bombmaker. That's also how we got to the head of the munitions procurement arm. That's one way, and it is a certain kind of approach to the film. But we also wanted to talk to everyday people whose lives were being touched like the father who lost his son. I lost friends in 9/11 and so I was always on mailing lists and newsgroups of families who lost people in 9/11 and so I learned about Wilson [Sekzer] and got to know him, and very much got to know him without the clear intent to make a movie. I got to know him first as someone who did not want to walk into his pained, private space and start setting up lights. I wanted to go in there and learn what he felt and where his life was at. And if he felt it was something that was movie-friendly, then we would start to talk about when we might plan that, but that was a very slow, very heartfelt courtship between someone like me who couldn't imagine Wilson's pain, and somebody like Wilson who had the courage and openness to let me into his life and to do so with an extraordinary amount of faith and trust, notwithstanding how hurt he's been by people in the past few years.
And so everybody was different. Ms. Kwiatkowski, who is the remarkable career Air Force veteran and pentagon Iraq specialist, had really gotten to a point where she was wanting to communicate to the public things that she alone had seen on the inside, things to which she had unique, privy access. She was willing to talk, but was also careful, because the subjects about which she's talking are very sensitive.
Along those lines, do you think there are documents that exist that you just can't get access to, that have a much clearer picture about the decision making process in the Bush administration that led to the Iraq war?
Well I don't think it's unique to the Bush administration at all. I think there are national security documents that none of us has ever seen, and many of them will never see the light of day. Freedom of information in the United States is a very good tool to try to get information, but ultimately what you are getting is the freedom to look at that information that certain agencies have deemed is appropriate for public consumption. It doesn't mean that all information is free for the public to consume. That is therefore a license for the powerful to keep secrets from the public forever. When I do get a document from the government declassified, as we did in this film, what comes to us is a redacted document. There is black ink all over the page blotting out things that were deemed too sensitive for us to read. So you'll get a letter that says, "Dear blank, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all blacked out, Sincerely, blank". That doesn't tell you very much. At the end of the day, yes, there is an enormous amount of information about the last 50 years, the last 200 years, of policy in the United States, that is very much hidden under lock and key. I would hope that the ideals of an open society being what they are, one would ultimately see that kind of material make the light of day, but too often it is the case that if it does see the light of day it does so at a time when those accountable are no longer in jeopardy.
One of the points you make in the film is that the war decision making process has gotten away from the people. How do you think we can get that back, or bring greater transparency to the process?
I think it is a matter of public engagement. Look at the outcry over New Orleans. Look at how the administration turned on a dime when it saw its numbers falling. The public was very much the motivator for the kind of shifts that you saw. We have to remember that the public always leads the policy makers. Throughout history the politician has said, "Show me where my people are going so that I may go and lead them." The public is always going to determine where society goes. What has happened in America is that there is a kind of unfortunate pattern to become very disengaged. And that should be of deep concern to everyone because that is the only way it becomes the case that the business of the country and therefore the world is run by an increasingly smaller group of people. I think the public has the power to pursue information, to understand that information empowers them, and that in a shrinking world, the smaller the world becomes, the more impactful an individual becomes. Each of us has more power to impact somebody in China today than we used to, and that is true across the board. We are living in a time when the individual, with the power of the internet, has greater access to information, and with greater mobility. And with greater interconnectivity between countries and people, the individual could have a far greater role than ever before. And yet we are allowing the powerful to guide the machine on our behalf. And with the war in Iraq having gone so terribly wrong, and with New Orleans, it is up to the people to run their world the way they want it run. And if they leave it up to an increasingly smaller group of elite people, that group of people will do what it suits them to do.
What I would like to see happen is for everyday people to see movies like mine, and like so many movies that are coming out, that are increasing the access to information. And they would use that information to become engaged. Becoming engaged doesn't mean just watching a movie, it means looking beyond the movie. I means going online and finding news you don't typically read, it means emailing that to your friends, it means having conversations that follow that – conversations like "What do we do next?" All of us are at a crossroads where we are seeing what the world is like when it is left up to the few to govern, and it is very clear that the public will have to become engaged, if for nothing else than to salvage the world that they inhabit.
Film and TV are powerful media for answering questions like the ones you raise, because there is a much lower threshold for discovering it, when you compare it to reading a book. And Michael Moore has shown that there is an appetite for this, although he is much more of a showman and his films are much more partisan than WHY WE FIGHT. Why do you think that so many intellectuals write books rather than make movies?
I think it's an unfortunate tendency to distrust the public. We've been convinced by the middlemen who sell our materials that they know the public's tastes. We've been convinced that the public is stupider than the public truly is. I think the public hungers for information in a way that the middlemen didn't expect, and I think that's what accounts for the extraordinary success of documentaries in recent years. The public is saying, in fact, I'm concerned enough about my world that I'd rather be told about my world than be told about fictional worlds coming out of Hollywood. I think documentaries are being looked to now to fill two voids. One is the void that was left by the failure of imagination in Hollywood. And so documentaries are suddenly looked at as carrying as much or more entertainment value and just sheer interest value as their counterparts in the dramatic world. But at the same time you have the collapse of American journalism. The tragic situation faced by American journalists who are good people trying to pursue the ideals of an open society, but people caught in a matrix beyond their control. They are now in a situation where the ideals that they set out to uphold are not even viable in a situation overly dominated by corporatism and the affairs of how media companies interact with the federal government and its policies about media. And so you now have a situation where the documentary maker is looked to, to be a kind of proxy journalist. The only reason I face that, is that unlike a person who works for a newspaper or a magazine, I don't have a job. In a sense I have nothing to lose. A person who is employed by a major newspaper will be held accountable if something they write offends a powerful person who wishes the paper had not written that. Whereas if I publish something that someone does not like, they could call my mother and she might scold me, but what worse thing is going to happen to me.
So the documentary maker, this fledgling, out of work dreamer, suddenly has it put to them to make their film. Often that leads to very subjective films, because people care deeply about things. Michael Moore and others care very deeply and they want to communicate their views. And in my case, I take that as a calling to try to uphold the highest ideals of journalism. You called it intellectual – I don't think its intellectual, I think journalism itself is hip, I just think that American journalism is no longer hip. How many movies have we seen about journalists getting to the truth of the matter and unearthing things, and getting into the halls of power. That's what I idealize.
What do you think conservatives will say after they see the movie?
Oh, I would hope they'd be very pleased by the movie. All of the people we spoke to in the film are people who have devoted their lives to public service. In many cases they've devoted their lives to thinking very deeply about American policy, past, present, and future. And that's what the film is about. Often it brings them together with people with whom they don't necessarily agree, but those are they same people they disagree with on op-ed pages. They are the same people they disagree with in debates. So at the end of the day I am a part of the promotion of healthy, rigorous, desperately needed debate in the American landscape, and all of them are a part of that also. And by participating in the film they demonstrate their willingness and desire to be part of trying to move us all forward, trying to understand better how the world operates, what our role in the world should be. When I ask WHY WE FIGHT, which is a question Frank Capra first asked about WWII, I'm trying to get very, very smart, very thoughtful people, and not the usual suspects, into a dialogue in which they can think out loud about how those reasons appear today, and to what extent they've changed since Frank Capra first asked, when the reasons for WWII appeared so clear.
But don't you think there will be conservatives on Fox News that will have their talking points aimed against you for saying that the reasons for going to war aren't the stated reasons?
Do you mean, how do I feel about the sort of sausage factory of network pundit coverage?…
… I mean, it seems to me that some conservatives will take offense that the film is saying that freedom is not the reason we are going to war in Iraq, or it's not often the reason we go to war. But that's always their stated reason. George Bush says, "The terrorists hate freedom." I can imagine they're going to be upset by this.
To be fair, part of having a healthy discourse in the public space is that every filmmaker his or her own subjective feeling about a subject. I do everything I can to bring together voices that agree and disagree with each other, and represent a broad range of thinking across the spectrum, so that somebody on one of those talk shows will as likely find someone in the film that they agree with as disagree with. If they are going to have talking points about disagreeing with this person or that person in the movie, they are likely to find somebody in the movie who does some of their heavy lifting for them. So, for example, somebody on a conservative talk show might look at the film and be glad to see that Richard Perle is in the film, be glad to see that William Kristol is in the film, or that Senator McCain is in the film, or that there are people in the film representing their perspective on American military policy and foreign policy that reflects their own. Somebody who doesn't agree with the war in Iraq, or who is a pundit on the other side will probably see people in the film who to some extent reflect their views. In all cases we tried to find a group of people who are not the usual suspects, and who are directly involved in the front-line implementation of America's military enterprise.
A pundit would really have to be speaking to people who have firsthand experience in the film, and they may disagree with those people, but those people might also say, I've worked in the Pentagon and you haven't. Or I've worked in the Senate and you haven't. Or I am an employee at an arms manufacturer and you're not. And so to some extent when you're making a film you try to get to the very people you should be talking to who hold the greatest expertise on the subject about which you're asking. And that usually makes it so that the pundits have less that they can just disagree with. What we hoped in the film was to present viewpoints. I may not agree with everyone in the film, somebody else may not agree with everyone in the film, but the views expressed, you don't necessarily agree with them, but you can't just disagree with them. You can't just dismiss them. If you could just dismiss them, they're not worth putting in a movie. They have to be those kind of opinions and thoughts expressed that make us all think twice. And thinking twice is the goal I have for anyone who watches the film, whether they agree with the war in Iraq, whether they agree with the sort of traditions of American foreign policy reaching back to World War II, or whether they are concerned about that direction. It is meant to make them think twice about their reason for concern, or their reason for support, and to do so in a way that makes them become more engaged, so that whatever happens the affairs of the state are more driven by them and their fellow [citizens] than by this elite group who run the policies.
So I don't care what somebody's political stripe is, I just want them to find in my film something that speaks to them, makes them think about the situation we face in a new way, and potentially makes them become engaged in either the way that they are used to, or in opposing directions. There are people in the film who have shifted. They thought one way their whole lives, and then the Iraq war, or some other event, changed their thinking. And then there are other people, like the two pilots who launched the war, they launched the opening strike on Baghdad. We've now learned that many of the premises that that was based on were not true, but those gentlemen still believe in what they do, and well they should. But at least a film that they get to watch, and they get to participate in, makes them think twice about the reasons and the contexts in which they are operating.
So if you could change something about the political system in the US, let's say you could pass a law, what would it be.
Easy. I would do the same thing that was done between church and state. The Constitution of the United States built a clear and unmistakable wall between the church and state. I would do the same thing between capitalism and democracy. As long as you do not have very clear and rigorous and infallible protection against the impact of money on the democratic process, you have a democratic process that's vulnerable to private interests. As long as you have that, you don't truly have a democratic process. You have a fa̤ade, or a kind of charade, where there are elements of democracy, but what's really happening is that a powerful, wealthy person simply has a greater voice than a not-so-powerful, not-wealthy person, who may, for example, not even be able to get to the voting booth because they've got to work on that particular day. So at the end of the day what we have is the situation that Eisenhower warned us about, that corporate power is gaining undue influence over the way policies are made. What he means is Рcapitalism is gaining too much power over democracy. That the healthy decision making process that we idealize coming out of democratic discourse is in peril when there is a vested interest of undue influence that is weighing in on that and corrupting the mechanisms of healthy debate.
You tell me, if I call up my congressman, or if the head of Lockheed Martin calls up my congressman, which call is he going to answer first? I can't help him get reelected, and its not his fault, he needs the money. He needs my call much less than that. That's wrong, but you can't then blame the guy. That is the system in which the guy operates. He's a stone's throw from that Lockheed Martin phone call wherever he goes. And every single American politician is in this situation, because politics is so much about fundraising. So that is part of what one would address in a Constitutional amendment separating capitalism from democracy.
So here we are in Canada, and one of the things I thought would have been interesting to see in the film is a comparison to a place like Canada that doesn't have the military-industrial complex that the US does, and see how they handle decisions about going to war or not going to war.
By the way, I think every country has a military-industrial complex.
It does, but it's not nearly…
It's a question of degree, sure. Michael Moore did this in Columbine. Michael more used in Columbine as a standard for comparison elements about the Canadian state that differ from the American state, other things being equal. So he made a kind of a joke out of "They say there's no crime in Canada because they say there's no black people," but then he goes to southern Ontario and there are black people. Well I think often those kinds of polemical devices of comparison strike most of us like opportunistic argumentation. They strike most of us like, "You aren't giving me the whole story. You sort of put the camera on a certain moment that makes it look a certain way." And I'm not referring to Michael Moore as much, it's just that when you make those comparative looks what you choose to put on each side of the scale is pretty subjective, and it usually leads to some pretty far-flung analysis.
So what I prefer to do if I can is to look at a situation in its own right and just try to get deeper and deeper into it. Shine a light as deep into it as I can and let other people try to conclude from that thoughts for themselves and thoughts impacted by smart people that I can bring to bear from differing stripes. You want the argument that is in the film to feel like it left no stone unturned. You don't want to leave the theater and go, "Oh they didn't answer that one thing. That guy got to say that thing, but nobody got to rebut it." You want everybody to rebut it so that at the end of the day the best argument can win and then help us all move forward into what would hopefully be a more sustainable world than Iraq and New Orleans.
You bring out a lot of issues that are being left by the wayside in the normal discourse you see on TV. The movie features one hero of mine, a champion of neglected stories, Charles Lewis and the Center for Public Integrity. What do you think people could do to emphasize these important stories that are not always being discussed in the media?
I think that will take care of itself. The failure of the mainstream media to have fulfilled its duty to the public during the Iraq war, and the failure of the mainstream media to withstand the forces of corporatism that corrupt it as much as it corrupts the health of our democracy itself has led people to have less belief in the media. The media is less trusted than it used to be. The public has had a sort of crisis of confidence in the media. As that pans out, we see the rise of new players, all over the internet for example. And those sites provide information that isn't just the same small filtration of material that is allowed by the corporate structure of mainstream American media. A story, or a photograph, or an inside scoop, leaks and makes its way around the society in a way that is consistent with the ideals of an open society as opposed to the ever-strangulated media system that we've come to experience. And so I think one doesn't have to worry about that so much. The work of pioneering, courageous journalists like Charles Lewis will break out of the pack and don't find themselves as victimized by the forces that victimize other journalists. That information will become known to the public, it will simply find its way.
It is just like how the music industry woke up one morning to find that people were sharing their music. The question now was, will they get a piece of the action or not. So the question for the movie industry, and the question for the mainstream media in the US is, the public has a desire for information, people who have a desire for freedom of information have a desire to share it with them. So either we're going to have to have a police state that stops those people from talking, or the mainstream media might as well get a piece of the action and cut themselves into the deal.
There was one quote that struck me in the film. Gore Vidal said that Japan was trying to surrender before we dropped the bombs on them. That is a serious charge because it says that the US killed a bunch of civilians to scare people, which is basically an act of terrorism. But there is no more evidence of that presented in the film. Do you think there is evidence for that?
Our research on the subject, talking to Chalmers Johnson, who having left the CIA was then head of the political science department at Berkeley, and is one of the leading specialists in the country on Asian affairs, also professor Dower at MIT, these people support the position that Japanese intelligence documents that have been released now reveal that the Japanese were in direct communication with the Soviet Union at that time to try to negotiate a peace with the US. There were a number of enterprises undertaken in the summer leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the Japanese indicating their willingness to surrender. There's a famous conversation in which the Japanese emperor is told they have no chance of winning. He says I know we have no chance of winning, but I just need to bring the Americans down to a level where they will at least give us better surrender terms. And that conversation leads to the battle of Okinawa, the bloodiest battle of the war. There's a reflection of a Japanese impulse based on their own recognition that they have no chance of winning. All of that could lead to the assumption that, in Gore Vidal's opinion, and it's only his opinion, that it's the reason we do it. We are ignoring the fact that they want to surrender and we are simply brutally doing something to scare the Soviet Union. Other people will take the view that it is only part of the reason. Yes, they might have been willing to surrender, but we have just had a very bloody battle with them. Who's to say they really would have surrendered. In a time of war I don't actually [unintelligible] to simply fault the policy maker and say he should have gone out of his way and assume his enemy is willing to surrender.
Yes that is a controversial issue, it's a controversial issue about which there is now a lot more information, and the conversation is about those that believe that to be the case, that the Japanese were willing to surrender, and that was enough known to American policymakers that it sheds unsettling light on the choice to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And then there are those that say absolutely not, the Japanese were not looking to surrender, and that made the difference. That is an ongoing historical debate, but better that it be a debate than we just assume what we've been told since World War II, which is that it was an outright correct thing to do that ends the war and thank God for it. That to me would be hard to sell at this point in history given what we now know about Japanese dialogue and the inner workings of America then.
And remember Iraq is a preemptive war. There is a viewpoint being expressed by Gore Vidal and others that that's a preemptive strike against Japan. As you know John Eisenhower in the film reflects that his father, Dwight Eisenhower disagreed with the bombing of Hiroshima.
[At this point, publicist Melissa Raddatz walked up to signal that our time is up.]
Can I just say one more thing about that….
Sure.
The film reaches back to World War II, when our reasons for entering that war seemed clearer than the reasons to enter a war like the Iraq war today. Frank Capra asked in those days why we fight, and made a series of films to explore our reasons for entering that war. It was our thought that when we made the film we are really asking about a war today, why do we fight, and we're asking, have the reasons changed, and how do Americans feel about what they're doing and how has that changed? That's why it is important to examine something like Hiroshima, which like the Iraq war was a preemptive strike. It was a preemptive strike to cause the Japanese not to do something, but it was also understood to be a preemptive strike that would have an effect on the Soviet outlook on the United States and our power. So to look back at that time and to understand that it was already happening, that the cart was already leading the horse. That the amount spent on weapons programs was starting to have an influence on, as you were saying earlier, on the efficacy of going to war, the viability of going to war. Essentially there was a shift happening where America was moving in an imperial direction, a direction not just concerned with ending one terrible tragic war, but looking ahead to the potential of future wars, of conquest and defense. That's a turning point moment, and I think the film looks from that moment to now at the progress of American imperialism from World War II to the present.
It is very much not about do I think we were trying to scare Stalin only or do I think the Japanese were willing to surrender, it's more about let's look deeply at all of what we've been told growing up, because we'll find that the truth has always been textured, and there's always more than meets the eye.
