Kwiatkoski was interviewed at length on CSPAN. I hope it aired at better times than the 11PM Sunday slot where I caught it. See the inteview if you can. I find her even more genuine and convincing on the small screen than she was in the film. This woman is a real hero. Her simple delivery flows with the urgency of a well-considered thought in a clear mind.
The interview is more dense with news than Jarecki's movie although more with backstory tidbits than with the sweeping indictment of the MIC. For instance
" But, I can tell you, I’ll tell you something about George Schultz, that - there was a fax that came into the office. It wasn’t for me. I happened to get it, and I looked at this fax. It was a short note from George Schultz, who was on - who at that time, I don’t know if he still is - but he was on the Defense Policy Board, along with Richard Perle. It was a fax, a copy of a fax that he had sent to Don Rumsfeld in June of 2002, June of 2002 I believe it was. It was the summer of 2002.And on this fax, it was a short, one-note thing, from Schultz to Rummy. Basically, we have to get together and talk about what we do after the victory in Iraq, and this was in the summer of 2002, long before even the president and the vice president had begun their round of why we fight-type propaganda speeches."
I'd fill pages with quotable things from the interview but of many things I will remember for a while, one really sticks with me because it is sad and points to a root of the problem: it is not that power-hungry fools can do much evil but a that majority of Americans don't bother to become informed and concerned about how foreign policy gets made.
"LAMB: The name of the move is ”Why We Fight.” Did you get any feedback since this movie’s been running in the theaters?
KWIATKOSKI: Lots of feedback. People are looking up my e-mail address on the Internet and sending me e-mails saying they’re really moved by it. But of course, it’s - again, the people that are watching ”Why We Fight” right now are people that are connected in some way to the documentary world and connected in some serious way, interested in a serious way, in our foreign policy. That’s not everyone in this country, OK? We could never go to a number of wars that we’ve gone to if Americans were totally engaged with what goes on in Washington, and most of them are not. But, there has been - the last word that I got from a viewer was that they went to this movie, and it was standing room only, and that’s very different than it was when it first opened."
And remember, this is from a retired Air Force Lt. Col with 20 years of service to her country.
You may also enjoy the way she takes a scalpel to the term "neocononservative".
She is a true patriot. Anyone wishing to shove the Iraq war back up the ass from which the Bush league delivered it, should get seen with or endorse this woman and her appeal.
Note: What looks like a valid URL is in fact a link to a page of ads for paramilitary shoppers: get your swords and stunguns there but the website of the remarkable David Hackworth to whom she refers is www.sftt.org which is still up but rendering empty whitespace for much of the former content and looking partly disabled or unmaintained. I am still hunting for the material she wrote for that site.
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