After having watched acclaimed and accredited director Eugene Jarecki's exposé Why We Fight the other night, there is only one conclusion I can draw upon: I apparently suffer from the military-industrial complex. This had been the second time I saw the film, both experiences leaving me with the similar impression of having just witnessed a pseudomentary, sinister in its presentation, attempting to explain the world's ills on some cynical and amoral Strangelovian cult inside the Pentagon.

Why We Fight poses juvenile questions, providing banal answers. The film begins with President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address in 1961 where he warns the country of "unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex" -- a concept that seeks to define an unethical collusion between business and the arms industry. While he later brushed off the warning at a speech to the National War College, what Eisenhower had characterized is the notion of military Keynesianism where the state succeeds within the barometers of a permanent war economy. Namely, the United States fights not for Jeffersonian liberalism or Wilsonian democracy, or due to fascistic or autocratic opponents, but because of a long-cherished creed by employees at the Defense Department to profit through promulgating war. How blasé.

When people speak surprisingly or shockingly, and display a faux sense of phony outrage, over the fact that corporations that provide a service through the selling of that service (and therefore continue to provide services) actually profit -- gasp! -- it is a strange critique of something that need not be critiqued. When debating Iraq, we hear similar arguments ad nauseam about petroleum; as if a natural resource exists in a vacuum, ignoring the phenomena of globalization, economic interconnectivity, foreign direct investment, and the like. (By the way, someone should kindly tell Iraqi oil minister Dr. al-Shahristani to cease selling his country's resources to BTU-hungry Asia and Europe; we're supposed to be stealing it.)

The inconsistency between the interviews and testimonies in Why We Fight is not shocking for someone who has taken note of the steep decline in professionalism in the arts and journalistic media. Be it a false Newsweek story of a mythically flushed Quran at Guantanamo, doctored AP photos enhancing the density of smoke clouds over Beirut, or a teary-eyed mea culpa from European reporters who first spoke of an Israeli-induced "Jeningrad" only to later admit of writing a "highly personalized account" of the small battle, intellectual dishonesty in this field is rampant. Jarecki fails to miss a beat and his film epitomizes this.

His previous works have centered on the amorality of U.S. realpolitik, exposing the likes of Henry Kissinger who would wine and dine with despots and dictators alike. The irony is that Jarecki would find agreement amongst the very same policymakers he seeks to discredit in Why We Fight -- namely, the intellectual driving forces behind democratizing the Middle East -- while he overlooks the role Eisenhower (the champion of the film) played in squashing nascent democratic states across Southwest Asia, Latin America, etc., in the apolitical and messy effort to contain Soviet expansionism.

I have seen John McCain and Richard Perle articulate their beliefs far more eloquently and extensively than was shown in Why We Fight. Meanwhile we listen to an unhinged Gore Vidal (when he's not talking with Alex Jones) and Karen Kwiatkowski, the now-retired Pentagon desk officer who is doing everything in her retirement to expose the supposed evils of her former bosses. When I personally asked her in an email to explain such evils, she abstractly mentioned an idealistic vision to promote democracy and "impose" human rights across the Arab Levant.

What's this? Bogeymen like Paul Wolfowitz are vilified for their support of democratic dissidents in authoritarian states, whereas the seemingly sober Eisenhower administration and women like Kwiatkowski are given an ethical pass -- as if geopolitics has anything to do the military-industrial complex at all. Promoting ideas like secular constitutionalism and women's rights in the face of Wahhabi fundamentalists or Iranian fatwas is "destabilizing" -- as if the stability of an autocracy and genital mutilation is a worthwhile goal. Ms. Kwiatkowski went on, reprimanding me in a paternalistic manner, suggesting I, like her, concentrate on international relations issues "more relevant to (her) own concerns, values, more important for (her) own life and prosperity." For some odd reason, she didn't seem this cavalier on film.

Worst still is the cult of victimization Jarecki taps into by following the story of a working class military recruit, while in the theoretical realm attempting to usurp his romanticism by exposing the flaws in his thinking. Concepts like dutifulness are scoffed at. And scenes where playground kids are asked why they think their country fights are painfully parasitic. Their innocent responses of "freedom" are supposed to arouse scorn and sympathy for the apparently unsophisticated children, as if eight-year-olds should delve into the socio-economic intricate nuances of weapons production.

The movie deduces itself as it goes along, not so much by the inconsistency of its hastily assembled points -- which hit the viewer in the face -- but with the points themselves, which reek of ahistoricity and silly absurdities. Jarecki's non-points about the wrongs of enhancing military technology and precision weaponry copycat the weird logic of some obscure Saudi imam that bans the concept of innovation. In a sense, Why We Fight damns everything that has come out of a 2,500-year-old Western military tradition that has seen untold and unprecedented successes against non-Western hooligan armies that uphold class, creed, or color over adaptation and inventiveness. Whereas others tap into their sand dunes, the heir of a Greco hoplite or Roman proconsul taps into their ingenuity. That is where the United States stands today. Unparalleled.

We should never make the mistake of equating dominance with domination. Jarecki takes the fact that Western powers have historically retained militarily supremacy over their adversaries as evidence of dishonorable militarism, not as confirmation that more tolerant, open, free, and egalitarian societies militarily thrive, by default, due to such cultural and intellectual equity. It has been this way since Themistocles had to convince his constituents to rebuild the Athenian naval fleet from 70 to 200 ships to ward off against an imperialist Persian Xerxes -- who would deploy 1,200 and then lose 200 of his own fleet -- to save Athenian democracy and Western civilization at Salamis.

Our defense establishment is drenched in a culture of almost radical anti-nepotism, introspection, self-critique, and civilian audit. Pentagon gurus like Andrew Marshall, a defense iconoclast octogenarian that has served every administration since 1947, play the role of a contemporary Leonidas or Eurybiades that seek a fusion between the public and private sector to enhance the effectiveness of American war-waging capacity. Just as Themistocles was ostracized later on by the citizenry he saved, so too courtyard jesters like Jarecki ankle-bite the likes of Marshall who has spent his entire life dedicated to protecting his countrymen.

The jabs at contract workers are almost mind numbingly short-sighted. Be it at Lepanto in 1571 where over 150 were killed every minute in a 40,000-dead bloodbath -- where German mercenaries saved their Spanish contingent and expelled the Sultan's armada -- or the 1942 mass conversion from private corporation to public necessity on the home front that saw Wars Bonds and the reconstruction of the Yorktown in 72 hours to go on and defeat the Japanese at Midway, it is the private sector, with public and open inquiry, that leads to this devastating and efficient Western way of war. Suicide vests, IEDs, EFPs, RPGs, and ragtag neck-slicing jihadists in black-clad pajamas are no intellectual match for the hypothesis, thesis, and concrete genius of a 65-year-old grandpa employed by Lockheed Martin, an ex-SEAL on Blackwater's payroll, a Northrop Grumman case study, or a teenager operating an unmanned drone over the Hindu Kush from a base in Nevada.