- guardian.co.uk,
- Tuesday April 01 2008 09:02 BST
A persuasive polemic, Eugene Jarecki's documentary, which won the Sundance grand jury prize takes an honourable place in a rather crowded field along with The Power of Nightmares, Fahrenheit 9/11 and John Pilger's recent The War on Democracy about the Iraq war, US foreign policy and the lies and manipulations that surround both.
It will be a familiar tale to most of us, but deserves repetition. Jarecki comes up with a trump card in an NYPD man who lost his son in 9/11 and was desperate to find some way of getting revenge against the perpetrators. What transpired was a bomb with his son's name on it "in loving memory" dropped on Iraq. This Dr Strangelove image is counterbalanced by the straight-talking New Yorker expressing his anger that the claimed Iraq/al Qaida links were non-existent.
The film takes its title from Frank Capra and its starting point is President Eisenhower's prescient warning when he left office in 1961 about the "military-industrial complex" and the danger of it turning into a "permanent defence industry of vast proportions". This is startling, coming from a Republican president and former general. The film includes interviews with his lookalike son, as well as Gore Vidal, who wearyingly refers to his country as the "United States of Amnesia".
The neocons, Cheney, Halliburton and economic colonialism get another going over in a well-organised film, which also includes GI interviews, one of whom, on duty in Iraq, declares smilingly to camera: "If we do our jobs right, this whole thing might be over tomorrow." Director Jarecki also made The Trials of Henry Kissinger, while his brother Andrew directed the compellingly peculiar documentary Capturing the Friedmans.
