[1] Why We Fight was first screened at the Sundance Film Festival on January 17, 2005, exactly forty-four years after President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address.

Although it won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, the film received a limited public cinema release on January 22, 2006.

Interviewed about this matter are politician John McCain, political scientist and former CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson, politician Richard Perle, neoconservative commentator William Kristol, writer Gore Vidal, and public policy expert Joseph Cirincione.

Why We Fight documents the consequences of said foreign policy with the stories of a Vietnam War veteran whose son was killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks, and who then asked the military to write the name of his dead son on any bomb to be dropped in Iraq; a 23-year-old New Yorker who enlists in the United States Army because he was poor and in debt, his decision impelled by his mother's death; and a military explosives scientist (Anh Duong) who arrived in the U.S. as a refugee child from Vietnam in 1975.

[4] Writer and director Jarecki said "serious examination of Eisenhower and the aftermath of his speech proved 'too radical' for potential American funders for his film" and except for Sundance, he "could not raise a dollar in the U.S."[4]