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Even though Why We Fight draws its title from Frank Capra's rousing WWII propaganda series, Eugene Jarecki's new film poses the phrase as a question. Capra's newsreelish films laid out reasons for going to war, based in moralistic oppositions. Jarecki's documentary argues, convincingly, that war is a business.

COMPLEX CONCEPTS: Why We Fight argues that the U.S. goes to war because the machinery demands it.

This point is not precisely news, but Jarecki contends that war-waging mechanisms have become more deadly, more cynical and more entrenched. Citing Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1961 farewell address, the film submits that the "military-industrial complex" (Eisenhower's phrase) now provides the impetus for going to war, sustained by intertwined military, political and ideological interests. The film includes a range of interviews, from Gore Vidal, Dan Rather and former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson to Richard Perle, John McCain and Anh Duong, a Vietnamese refugee who now develops massive, landscape-destroying weapons for the U.S. Navy.

Alongside these original interviews, Why We Fight arranges bits from archival and recent footage, and two stories that wind throughout the film. The first features William Solomon, a young Army recruit who joins up when his mother dies, school becomes impossible and he feels lost; the second is retired New York cop Wilton Sekzer, who lost his son in the World Trade Center and describes his changing perception of the war on terror. Initially, Sekzer believes the Iraq war will provide suitable payback. He begins an e-mail campaign to have his son's name written on a bomb, feeling triumphant when he learns he has achieved this little bit of memorializing, then horrified when President Bush casually renounces his claim that the war had any connection to 9/11. Stunned, Sekzer wonders aloud about the extent of the lies that went into making the war—and beyond that, establishing national pride and identity. As his eyes well up, you can only imagine how this Vietnam veteran is thinking back on his own experience as a young man.

These individual cases only underline the film's stand against the "complex," usually understood as having three components—the military, the government and the arms industry. Now, according to historian Gwynn Dwyer, there's a fourth: the think tanks that devise and perpetuate policy, unelected and therefore responsible to no one save their sponsors. As the film traces the steady slide (or build-up, depending on your perspective) into militaristic presumption—that the U.S. must be the sole superpower, maintaining its military at the risk of all else, including education, medicine and non-arms-oriented technologies—it does not blame any single administration or party. Instead, it posits the lust for empire as an ongoing dilemma through history, now amplified by technology and increasingly devastating.

Why We Fight's claims to truth are both sweeping and detailed. Many are obvious or at least well-rehearsed, like the problem of blowback or the no-bid Halliburton contracts (Center for Public Integrity founder Charles Lewis pithily sums up this situation: "We elected a government contractor as vice president"). Others emerge in connections the film makes plain: U.S. concerns over Iran led to its support of Saddam; the need for oil presents overriding "interests" in the region; the lack of a military draft sustains a myth of a "volunteer" army and creates crisis in long-term imperial planning. Military recruiting tactics come under fire by Defense Department analyst Franklin Spinney, who notes that the "Army of One" campaign and other strategies "appeal to [recruits'] self-interest and then put them in situations that demand self-sacrifice." Such a system of advertising, or cultural conditioning, is flawed from its inception. At times, the film deploys its own loaded images, pairing Johnny Cash's "Hurt" to images of carnage.

But for the most part, Why We Fight keeps a remarkably sharp focus on both the big picture and the individuals who suffer or sustain it. Two pilots who initiated the "Shock and Awe" campaign in 2003 extol the precision of their targeting (though it has emerged that targets were missed), the American Enterprise Institute's William Kristol commends the importance of that think tank's pre-9/11 report, "Rebuilding America's Defenses;" and Pentagon whistleblower Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski describes her own trajectory from a military career to her decision never to let any of her children join the military to "help the U.S. pursue an imperial agenda."

Each of the interview subjects has a stand on the broader story of the military-industrial complex. Why We Fight situates some against others, so their stories collide in ways that support its own arguments, with a rigorous narrative structure toward that end. While it's probably speaking to many converted viewers, it's also asking questions for and of others. These questions are genuine and profound, going to the heart of how the U.S. works as a self-interested "nation" (whatever that term can mean) and an ideological force.

Why We Fight Directed by Eugene Jarecki A Sony Pictures Classics release Opens Friday at area theaters