Jonathan Richards
HIJACKING CATASTROPHE:
9/11, FEAR, AND THE SELLING OF AMERICAN EMPIRE
Documentary
Unrated, 68 minutes
THE ONLY THING WE HAVE IS FEAR
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." Hermann Goering at the Nurenberg trials
The quote from the Nazi Reichsmarshall that serves as an epigraph for this sobering, frightening documentary has been much in the public eye since the buildup to the war in Iraq. The cynical truth it tells is as valid now as it was in 1946. What filmmakers Sut Jhally and Jeremy Earp bring to light in this movie is the underlying philosophy that drives the bidding of America's leaders in our current war.
With the exception of the tenacious Vice President, most members of the Bush Administration have long since abandoned the claim that Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction were the reason for the invasion (`It was simply the easiest thing for all parties to agree on,' admitted Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.) So the filmmakers press the question: if it wasn't about WMD, what was it about? Not surprisingly, they reject the bromide that it was about bringing freedom to oppressed Iraqis. The answer, they tell us, is readily available in the writings and policies of the architects of neo-conservatism since the end of the Cold War: to construct an unchallenged American Empire. Or as author Chalmers Johnson (Sorrows of Empire) puts it, `a new empire beyond good and evil.'
In his 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, Wolfowitz wrote of the need for a `preemptive and unilateral military force to prevent emergence of a new rival to American power, and to ensure access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf Oil.' A year before the WTC and Pentagon attacks, the neo-con policy document Rebuilding America's Defenses declared that `the process is likely to be a long one…absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.'
September 11th fit that bill. And while it provided no direct rationale for an attack on Iraq, such justification was not long in coming. Hijacking Catastrophe begins with a montage of Administration voices affirming our certain knowledge that Saddam Hussein possessed of weapons of mass destruction, and insinuating a link between the Iraqi despot's regime and the terrorists of al-Qaeda. It was not long before these insinuations succeeded in convincing a majority of the American public. With color-coded terror alerts at home and shock-and-awe abroad, fear replaced hope as our defining tool. As Norman Solomon (of the Institute for Public Accuracy) observes, the neo-con agenda twists FDR's idea that `the only thing we have to fear is fear itself' into `the only thing we have to fear is not enough fear.'
The concerns go beyond the manipulation of fear and fact. Several commentators worry about the economic cost of our current course. Concerns about foreign entanglements, bloated budgets, and a debtor economy were once the province of conservatives, but the neo-cons have swept those doubts aside. Our $400 billion military budget is nearly the equal of the rest of the world's combined, and almost one-third of our $700 billion debt is held by other countries. Eventually those bills will come due, this film suggests. `Things that can't go on forever, don't,' says Johnson.
There has been no shortage this summer of movies critical of this administration's adventures. The most visible was Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, which combined satire, outrage, those unforgettable seven minutes in a Florida classroom, and the roly-poly filmmaker's disheveled energy to galvanize viewer emotions. This documentary is far less of a polemic; rather than beating the Bushies with entertaining cheap shots (Administration officials being made up for TV, Wolfowitz slicking back his hair with spit), it explores to devastating effect their documented beliefs, shifting rationalizations, and numerous self-contradictions. Narrated by Julian Bond, it features interviews with a number of pundits expressing opinion and fact. They include well-known leftists like Noam Chomsky and Norman Mailer, but also a number of concerned experts whose voices will be harder for critics to dismiss, such as retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski and former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who describes this administration's abridgement of traditional American values and protections as `nothing less than a frontal assault on the Constitution.'
Jhally and Earp have put together a case that is short (just over an hour) but packed with information that Americans need to consider in evaluating who we are and what we ought to stand for in the world. It is all in the public record, if we care to look.
In the Nurenberg interview from which the movie's epigraph is drawn, Goering also said `Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? (But) it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.'
The interviewer, an American intelligence officer, interrupted. "There is one difference -- in a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives....'
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