Eugene Jarecki's powerful documentary, Why We Fight, is currently playing at the Harvard Exit in Seattle, and will hopefully appear at many other theaters locally and nationally in coming weeks. Beginning with Eisenhower's famous farewell speech that warned of the dangers to the nation posed by America's burgeoning "military-industrial complex," the movie painstakingly documents how prescient that warning truly was. (And reminds us of how little the military-hero-turned-Republican-president has in common with chickenhawk Republicans of today.)

Juxtaposing historical footage with modern-day talking heads--including Richard Perle, William Kristol (both among the neocon architects of current military policy), John McCain, Chalmers Johnson, retired Air Force Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, Gore Vidal (briefly), and other analysts--the film explores how thoroughly the "military-industrial complex" has taken hold of American policy, and how this complex has become much more, well, complex than in Eisenhower's time.

Congress is certainly part of the complex. The film shows how the arms industry disperses its production throughout states and congressional districts, as well as using lobbying and campaign contributions to keep Congress members in line. Think tanks have grown in importance and influence, as best illustrated by the notorious Project for a New American Century that cooked up the currently operative schemes for American world-domination long before the Bush administration came to power. The media serves as a cheerleader for war rather than a thoughtful and critical counterbalance. And the revolving door between arms industry execs and government officials has reached its high point in the Bush administration.

Add in the national trauma of 9/11 and you've got the perfect recipe for war.

But importantly, the film's chronology of the growth of this many-headed militarist monster shows that the Bush gang of imperialist neocons are more a natural evolution than a radical departure. As we've moved from the War on Communism to the War on Terror, as American empire expands and the war complex has grown more multifaceted and deeply rooted in our economy, our politics, and our culture, the implication becomes clear: We fight because we have grown addicted to fighting. The hammer of America's military machine inevitably sees every problem as a nail. The mutually reinforcing institutional imperatives that make up the war complex act as interlocking gears in a giant machine: Wind it up and the machine does exactly what you'd expect. It makes war. War without end, always seeking new enemies to fight.

Still, making war in a nominally democratic society like the United States does require a large degree of citizen support. The story of Wilton Sekzer, which provides a personalized narrative thread through the movie (much like Lila Lipscomb in Fahrenheit 911), demonstrates both how easy such support is to secure and how quickly this support can turn to disillusionment in the face of government lies. Sekzer is a retired New York cop and Vietnam vet who lost a son in the World Trade Towers. The movie shows his thirst for vengeance--culminating in getting the military to put his son's name in one of the bombs dropped on Iraq--which then turns to anger at being duped when he hears Bush admit that Saddam didn't really have anything to do with 9/11 after all.

In that disillusionment and awakening lies our salvation. Although Why We Fight may not contain many startling revelations for most progressives and anti-war activists, hopefully its thoughtful and well-packaged presentation will find a wide enough audience to further the disillusionment and awakening of more Americans to the real reasons behind our country's war-making ways.