The first half of Why We Fight I was kind of bored and wondered why I had heard so many good things. The preview made it look so provacative. It just seemed like a lot of talking heads going over the same things I already knew: the build up to the Iraq war was a lie, the military industrial complex is too powerful, we’re a violent nation, etc.
Then toward the middle of the end it started to really get my emotions. The storyline that started it off was the New York cop who put the name of his son who was killed in 9/11 on a bomb going to Iraq finding out that Iraq wasn’t connected with Al Qaeda. I don’t think even the best actors could have duplicated that feeling of betrayal that he exhibited. The movie just gets more powerful from there, and the facts presented get more interesting: how many targets we actually hit in the first days of the war (none), what our exit strategy for Iraq really was (there was none), where some of the ‘facts’ used to support the war came from (20 years ago).
Even having heard most of this film’s information before, it turned out to be an extremely worthwhile and well made movie. It reminded me how easy it is to forget about a love of and desire for peace when so many powerful forces are urging war. I need to remind myself never to be duped into thinking violence is justified again. The movie even does something that I didn’t think it would really try to do in the beginning, something that I thought it would leave as just a rhetorical question – try to explain why we fight. The answers provided will hopefully remind us all why we shouldn’t.