Why We Fight: The Q & A

So going to see this film once I get back from the weekend, but here's a little snippit from an interview in the Village Voice:

The film argues that the forces now at play in Iraq aren't a few years old or 15, but 50 or 60. Why is that perspective so rare even among progressives in the U.S.?

There's a tendency to lay all our problems at the feet of George W. Bush, to want to see him as taking a radical departure from the traditions of U.S. foreign policy. But Bush wasn't born overnight: He's the product of decades of movement by this country away from its origins and ideals, and toward something more aggressive, more arrogant, more imperial. The Iraq war certainly isn't the first time that the reasons we were given to go to war have turned out not to be the real reasons why we went. Ultimately I think it's a political distraction for us to be obsessed with Bush or any other single figure. The larger forces that the film examines are those—including the military- industrial complex—that are undoing the very fabric of the democracy we're fighting for. It's what Eisenhower meant when he said, "We must avoid destroying from within that which we are trying to protect from without."

It'll be playing at the Laemmle Sunset 5 starting Friday.