Richard Perle

Offering a glimpse into a little-known battle of the Cold War era, this documentary follows the 30-year fight to free Jews in the U.S.S.R. from Soviet oppression, a movement that resulted in the emigration of more than a million Jews out of Russia.

Grand Jury Prize winner at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, "Why We Fight" offers a revealing look at how America has readied itself for battle, and what compels us to so frequently wage war around the world. Produced in the midst of the second Iraq War, documentary filmmaker Eugene Jarecki's "Why We Fight" is an unflinching examination of the forces fueling the American military machine for over half a century and their global consequences. The film opens with President Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1961 farewell speech, in which he warned Americans of the growing power of the "military industrial complex." Expanding upon Eisenhower's warning, Jarecki relies on interviews with American soldiers, government officials, military insiders, defense industry personnel, congressman, scholars, ordinary Iraqis, and many others to provide personal, political and economic analysis of the last 50 years of U.S. military expansion, wars and interventions. What emerges is an eye-opening and often chilling portrait of how political, corporate, and military interests have become progressively entangled through the business of war.

As the United States finds itself waging a war in Iraq for reasons that seem increasingly unclear, this documentary asks the question: has the machinery the United States established to wage war helped prevent conflict, or has it inspired it?