War Made Easy

By Mina Hochberg

It's not as incisive or devastating as other recent war documentaries like "No End in Sight" and "Taxi from the Dark Side," but "War Made Easy" raises significant critical points about America's relationship with war in the past four decades, specifically in regards to the over-chumminess between White House administrations and media outlets.

Ticking off a list of American wars, occupations and troop deployments, from Vietnam to Panama to Iraq, the documentary opens with the assertion that the White House has a long history of instigating military action for ulterior motives that are ultimately withheld from the public. Uninterested in dredging up these motives, the mainstream American media has instead reported de facto on wars -- tracking escalations and technology developments, consulting retired generals and White House officials, but not investigating the initial right or wrong of the wars. The documentary has no tolerance for the excuse that journalists aren't born with 20/20 hindsight.

A la "The Daily Show," the film mashes up a number of effective quote montages to show just how pervasive and propagandist war-rally rhetoric has become. One blast of quotes shows president after president calling military action a last resort, citing [insert synonym for democracy, e.g. freedom, peace]. Another shows presidents attributing evil names like [insert synonym for evildoer, e.g. "servant of evil" or "barbaric people"] to the target nations. And there are plenty of montages ridiculing the brouhaha of war punditry that crowds the airwaves.

Whether or not you're in the choir it's preaching to, the film could have benefited from a more studied approach to its arguments -- which, though compelling, worthy and well-documented elsewhere, come across as rather broad here. But quibbles aside, it's disheartening to think that WMDs are just a reinvention of an old trick in the "let's start a war" book. And it's equally disheartening to think that the media is more obsessed with how to chyron the war than how to investigate it.