A partly successful attempt to document the
growth of the “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower warned of
in his 1961 farewell address.
Documentary filmmaker and college professor Eugene Jarecki
calls himself an Eisenhower Republican. His new movie takes its name and
subject from Frank Capra’s series of World War II propaganda films, but its
inspiration from Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell speech. Despite having leveraged
his war-hero status into a two-term presidency, Eisenhower warned of the danger
of what he termed the military-industrial complex. Jarecki has assembled a wide
variety of voices, experts like Senator John McCain and ordinary folks like a
retired New York cop (whose son perished on 9/11) and a young army recruit.
These voices, also including Eisenhower’s son and granddaughter, are worth
hearing, and Jarecki doesn’t limit his experts to leftist types, or even to
those who you’d expect to agree with him. (Bill Kristol and Richard Perle are
among the hawkish.) The movie’s a little haphazard in its structure, but
suggests that politicians, corporations, and employees alike amount to
different cogs in the giant wheel of the MIC, a wheel propelled by inertia as
well as the economic interests of those players. Though he conceived his film
before the Iraq war, that becomes his case study.
Jarecki isn’t a rabble-rouser like Michael Moore; though not
admiring of the current administration, he sees the president (and not just the
current one) as another cog. Both Democrats and Republicans have ignored
Eisenhower’s warning; the USA outspends the next dozen nations combined on its
military. The jobs provided by building unnecessary weapons systems become the
justification for them, and few in Congress will challenge them at a financial
cost to their constituents. I kind of already believed this, yet I still wasn’t
entirely sold by Jarecki. There was a lot of explanation, and if the idea of
the MIC is new to you, this isn’t a bad place to learn. But I think the film’s
primary audience will be those already familiar with the idea, and I was
looking for specifics as well as talking heads. For example, the film only
gives one dollar figure to illustrate the above point about weapons systems
bringing money to an individual congressional district, though we’re told
generally that military dollars flow very widely. The cop’s changing outlook is
interesting, but it’s only an illustration, only one guy. Finally, the intense
media coverage of the Iraq War makes some of Jarecki’s movie (like the details
about Vice President Dick Cheney’s ties to Halliburton) redundant, even if he’s
trying to make a larger point.
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