hippies suck
So I just saw Why We Fight with angela.
I had previously visited a Q & A session with the guy who made it (Eugene Jarecki). My impression, based both on the film and the session, is that this guy is really bad at making coherent arguments. His movie is semi-coherent; he lays out a lot of facts with vague connections between them, without doing the hard working of actually formulating a case and proving it to the viewer.
Anyone trying to connect the "military-industrial complex" to the war in Iraq confronts a basic problem: the military was skeptical of the war from the very beginning (see for example here for an explication of how cheney and rumsfield tried to bypass the pentagon analysts), while there is no evidence at all that the anyone from the industrial wing played any part in the decision.
So, given that there is no direct connection, the question becomes: did the military-industrial complex have an indirect effect on people's thinking, leading to the Iraq war?
I'd agree with Jarecki that the answer is yes. His reasons, however, do not make much sense. At the Q & A session, he suggested that because the military is around, we feel compelled to use it (wow, deep man). In the movie, he suggests that the pork barreling, the presence of weapons factories in the districts on many congressmen, alters the political calculus associated with war. But this is exactly backwards; large weapons programs with factories in multiple districts make expensive weapons that are not really necessary for a war against a technologically inferior adversary such as Iraq. The war in Iraq thus highlights how useless many of these high-priced toys really are. For example, the F-22 and the B-2 - the biggest planes in the US arsenal - have been harmed by cuts in the wake of the Iraq war precisely for this reason.
If you are interested in how high military spending, combined with the organizational structure of the military, makes wars more likely, a good read is this extended essay on the subject.
I had previously visited a Q & A session with the guy who made it (Eugene Jarecki). My impression, based both on the film and the session, is that this guy is really bad at making coherent arguments. His movie is semi-coherent; he lays out a lot of facts with vague connections between them, without doing the hard working of actually formulating a case and proving it to the viewer.
Anyone trying to connect the "military-industrial complex" to the war in Iraq confronts a basic problem: the military was skeptical of the war from the very beginning (see for example here for an explication of how cheney and rumsfield tried to bypass the pentagon analysts), while there is no evidence at all that the anyone from the industrial wing played any part in the decision.
So, given that there is no direct connection, the question becomes: did the military-industrial complex have an indirect effect on people's thinking, leading to the Iraq war?
I'd agree with Jarecki that the answer is yes. His reasons, however, do not make much sense. At the Q & A session, he suggested that because the military is around, we feel compelled to use it (wow, deep man). In the movie, he suggests that the pork barreling, the presence of weapons factories in the districts on many congressmen, alters the political calculus associated with war. But this is exactly backwards; large weapons programs with factories in multiple districts make expensive weapons that are not really necessary for a war against a technologically inferior adversary such as Iraq. The war in Iraq thus highlights how useless many of these high-priced toys really are. For example, the F-22 and the B-2 - the biggest planes in the US arsenal - have been harmed by cuts in the wake of the Iraq war precisely for this reason.
If you are interested in how high military spending, combined with the organizational structure of the military, makes wars more likely, a good read is this extended essay on the subject.