Award-winning Vermont filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, who took top honors
at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival for his must-see documentary “Why We
Fight” (now out on DVD), has spent the past several years researching
the nature of the United States and the motivations that lie behind its
war-making capabilities. As the world marks the beginning of the fifth
year of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, he reflects on the costs of war,
the nature of the United States Empire, and the notion of non-violent
secession - the peaceful dissolution of the United States. Eugene lives
in the Mad River Valley.

Vermont Commons editor Rob Williams conducted this interview.

Rob Williams: This month marks the fifth anniversary of U.S.
government’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. What’s on your mind?

Eugene Jarecki: The costs. Human, political, economic, and
spiritual. Beyond the trauma experienced overseas by the Iraqi
people and American and other soldiers, the Iraq War has become a case
study in the ravages of war on all aspects of the U.S. republic’s
domestic life, as well. America’s framers, however flawed, were
very smart in designing the Constitution to put what they called a
“check on the dog of war.” They recognized that the chaos and
insecurity of wartime are conditions that particularly favor the
executive branch. If a bomb fell at this moment, no matter how
much you and I believe in democracy, some part of us would be willing
to say, “there’s no time to deliberate, we need to do something.”
And we see a single individual as more able to just move on his feet
than a large group of parliamentarians discussing the matter. This is a
natural human impulse in an emergency, but it fundamentally shifts
power to the executive to “do something” rather than Congress to
“deliberate.” But it also means that if an executive can simply
keep a country on wartime pins and needles all the time (e.g. the Red
Scare, the War on Terror), then he can keep the country in a condition
favorable to executive power all the time. The enormous executive
powers that have been concentrated by the Bush Administration are
evidence of the extent to which wartime fosters conditions that promote
executive power and thus disrupts the separation of powers, a feature
that is fundamental to the functioning of the U.S. republic.

RW: When you finished “Why We Fight” a few years ago, did you imagine the U.S. would still be occupying Iraq in 2008?

EJ: Yes. America was building some 14 permanent bases in Iraq at
the time we made the film and plans were under way to construct the
massive new U.S. embassy there, so I knew we would still be
there. I also recognized that whereas Vietnam was a skirmish
between superpowers in a location that was geo-strategically
irrelevant, the Iraq War is, by contrast, located at the epicenter of
world power. There is no way in a petroleum-based economy like
ours for America to have wrought the kind of regional instability she
has done with this conflict (and past conflicts for that matter) and
then simply withdraw. I am not endorsing non-withdrawal.
Rather, I am simply saying that when millions of us expressed our
concern about this deeply misbegotten campaign from the start, beyond
the obvious human costs that lie ahead, it was also clear that it was a
trick-strategy for inserting a permanent U.S. military presence in the
region. Americans were wooed into thinking it would be a
“cakewalk” as the administration portrayed it, only to discover that it
might be a “long slog,” only later to discover that we could never
actually leave. And in fact, it could be argued that since this
unfolding of events was entirely predictable, those who undertook it
anyhow fundamentally knew that it was a long-term occupation they were
likely committing America to. But I think they accepted that
reality as a price of being the world’s leading superpower and wanting
to have a controlling hand in the world’s most oil-rich region.

RW: Our “take” at Vermont Commons since the 2003 conflict began has
been that the Bush administration, far from being “bumbling” or “inept”
(as it is often portrayed in U.S. media outlets willing to criticize
the Iraq War) has acted with deliberate and willful planning to
destabilize Iraq, and make piles of money bombing, re-building and
privatizing the assets of the country, while setting up a permanent
long-term presence there. This leads to a much more important question:
Can a so-called republic like the United States engage in “preemptive
war,” as in the case of Iraq, and still remain a functioning republic?

EJ: For the reasons I gave earlier, I think war per se is incompatible
with the principles and functioning of a republic. ‘Preemptive
war’ is simply a more advanced form of anti-republican policy that
accepts a permanent wartime footing. If anyone can be a possible
enemy and we do not have to wait for an attack to determine this, then
a condition of war – once again, the condition that favors the
executive – is essentially available anytime the executive declares
that we have an enemy who needs attacking. Suddenly, without
previous criteria for war having been met, we are at war, and we are
then told that there’s no time or space to question the executive at a
time of war. But if we are always at war, then that means one can
never question the Executive. And that sounds a lot more like
dictatorship than republicanism or democracy to me.

RW: Agreed. So in a nutshell, to ask the question your documentary asks in its title, “why DO we fight?”

EJ: We fight because human beings have in them a mix of altruistic and
selfish impulses. And just as children sometimes get along and
sometimes don’t, governments and nations do the same. This is the
understandable and probably inevitable aspect of why war is part of the
human experience.

On top of this, though, we discover that there are systems of
governance the world over in which the more powerful exploit the less
powerful, and war is a vital component of these systems. So the
American people did not decide to go to war in Iraq. A small
handful of political and corporate leaders did. And then the
American people – who are busy, and overworked, and spectacularly
disengaged from the actual workings of their government – were
essentially herded by a combination of political rhetoric and
mass-media manipulation into a wartime footing. They were
worked into anti-Islamic frenzy by the portrayal of 9/11 not as
essentially the work largely of Saudi young men but as a widely Islamic
experience.

By blurring this, Americans’ lack of knowledge of geography and
foreign culture is exploited to make war against any Arab state qualify
as a legitimate response to 9/11. It is only later that the
American public learns that the country their children will die
fighting in had no link to 9/11 and that it was actually just a
pre-conceived agenda of certain members of the Bush Administration to
take out Saddam and occupy Iraq per se. So the oil companies have
profited immensely from the war, the administration has drawn enormous
executive power, the defense and security industries have seen their
profits multiply. And the American people are left scratching
their heads wondering how this all happened.

RW: You are currently working on a book about the nature of American war-making. What are you learning?

EJ: I am learning that the problems we are discussing here do not
belong to one political party or another. War favors the
executive whether he is a Democrat or a Republican. We have as
many wars in this country run by Democrats as by Republicans, and the
reason for this is that war represents a convergence of the interests
of the political and economic leading classes in America. It
isn’t a conspiracy where people meet in dark alleys and hand over
suitcases full of money and whisper to each other about where they
should drop the bombs. They don’t have to do any of that.
The system does it all on its own. The system is fundamentally
oriented toward war. This is the case for more reasons than I can
explain in this short interview, but to give you one example:

What is a congressperson’s primary job? To bring jobs and money to their home district, right?

The jobs are for the people and the money is to put ads on TV,
telling the people at election time who brought them their
jobs. Well in order to get these jobs and money,
Congresspeople need to keep their corporate benefactors happy.
And to do this, they have to act as a pleader on behalf of the
benefactor to whom? To the executive branch. Whether it is a
pharmaceutical giant that wants some FDA favor, or an arms maker who
wants to keep getting money from the DOD for their F-22 fighter, or a
media company that wants to loosen ownership restrictions. It
doesn’t matter.

Take the F-22 as another example. So the Congressperson
goes to the executive branch in the form of the Department of Defense
and pleads for continued funding of the F-22. “Dear Secretary of
Defense, I don’t need to tell you how much the people of my district
see the F-22 as a vital part of America’s defense” and so forth.
The secretary of defense says, “Thanks for your call, we’ll take it on
advisement as we review our defense budget.” That’s on a
Monday. On Tuesday, when another member of the executive branch
calls back our congressman, this time it’s the president. And he
says “Hey congressman, I think there might be WMDs over in Iraq and I’m
hoping I can count on your support.”

Well, is the congressperson going to say “Wait a minute!
Show me the evidence, Mr. President!” I mean, remember, just
yesterday this guy was asking the executive branch for a lifeline in
terms of continued support to his benefactor. Is he today going
to exert much resistance? No. That doesn’t mean he
will necessarily be absurdly vocal for attacking Iraq. But it
might just mean he falls eerily quiet. And isn’t that what so
many of our congressional leaders did? Fall quiet? So what
this shows is that the position occupied by the congressperson is one
in which they are actively suborned to the will of the executive.
They are stuck in the middle because money is so corrupting a force in
the system. And it means that any corporate interest – whether
drugs, guns, or butter – can make the Congress vulnerable to the
executive’s constant desire for war.
Only by taking the money out of politics can one stop this corrupt
circuit from affecting both parties. Until then, it’s a pretty
airtight system.

RW: We at Vermont Commons argue that the U.S. is now an “empire” rather than a “republic.” What’s your take here?

EJ: The word “empire” is, arguably, too small a word to describe
the kind of unprecedented global power that the United States
wields. I would argue she is somewhere on her way from a republic
to something far more expansive than an empire, but at this pace and
with this lack of foresight, she will nonetheless likely face the fate
of an empire. And I don’t think she or her people are prepared
for that. And that is worrisome.

RW: Those of us in the Vermont independence camp argue that the U.S. is
an Empire that is ultimately unsustainable and that non-violent
secession must be explored as it was in 19th century New England during
the early years of the U.S. Republic. What’s your take?

EJ: It’s funny that Texas and Vermont are the two states that have most
seriously considered secession in recent years and that they are both
border states. I think that border identity makes one feel a bit
more free to self-define, than when one is more landlocked within the
country.

Having said that, I think the primary benefit of the secession
debate is twofold. On the one hand, it is very healthy from a
states-rights and individual-rights perspective for all Americans to
remember that the United States is, was, and always has been a
work-in-progress and that she is healthiest when her form of government
is not assumed to be etched in stone but rather is a living, breathing
thing that is responding to the discoveries made by her people about
the challenges of self-governance. So, I think in that
sense, secession is an extreme position that helps liberate us from a
latent level of nationalism that can creep into our thinking and make
us forget that this country is just one effort at democracy in a long
global struggle for systems that safeguard human dignity, and that
after this country is gone there will hopefully be others who learn
from our experience.

The second benefit of the secession debate (as was the case with
Texas) is that it captures the attention of the nation and, by so
doing, gives the little state of Vermont a very big shadow in
influencing the national debate and, once again, liberating the
nation’s citizens from any presumption that everything we do is right
and nothing we do is wrong. Thinking that way is political death.

RW: Thanks for talking with us, Eugene, and the best of luck with your book project.