June 27 (Bloomberg) -- More than a million Americans spent two hours of their discretionary entertainment time last week watching Anderson Cooper interview Angelina Jolie about how wonderful she is, how wonderful she thinks Anderson is, and their respective celebrity clout in saving African and Katrina victims.

By contrast, inside the Beltway, hundreds of wonks were drawn to a Council on Foreign Relations screening of ``Why We Fight,'' a film starring the antithesis of puffed-lip Hollywood celebrity, former President Dwight Eisenhower.

The film opens with the most experienced commander-in-chief in the last century giving a speech warning of the growing military-industrial complex. ``The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists,'' he said. ``We must never let the weight of this . . . endanger our liberties or democratic processes.''

With more subtlety and less overreaching than Michael Moore's ``Fahrenheit 9/11,'' the film shows how we went ahead and did just that. The film quotes Senator John McCain, neo-con Bill Kristol and a former female lieutenant in the Pentagon who worked with the Office of Special Plans (special to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney). The result is the tale of how the country was steamrolled into the Iraqi war by an administration bent on promoting supportive intelligence, however sketchy, and burying unfavorable intelligence, however solid.

Ike's Fears

How Ike's fears came true is shown through the stories of everyday people: two pilots who launched the first attack of the Iraq war, a Vietnamese woman who escaped U.S. bombs in 1973 and now labors in the factory that makes them, and a fresh recruit you wish could have a few more years of his youth.

The most poignant tale is that of a New York policeman who lost his son on Sept. 11 and finds solace in President George W. Bush's revenge on Saddam Hussein. He gets his son's name imprinted on a bomb to exact his own.

After the president announced there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after all, he asks, ``What the hell did we go in there for.'' Unlike the Bush administration, he had an excuse. ``I was so insane with wanting to get even, I was willing to believe anything.''

The draw for many in the audience was the post-screening panel featuring two Republicans who have come down on opposite sides of the war: Richard Perle, appointed by the president to the powerful Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, and retired Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff. Keeping them at a safe distance was Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of the movie's star.

Ardent Hawk

Perle is one of the most ardent hawks to serve in government, although he didn't serve in the military. As assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan Administration, he so opposed arms control that he was called the Prince of Darkness.

Leading up to the invasion, Perle recommended ``total war'' in Iraq and predicted Saddam and his supporters would disappear ``at the first whiff of gunpowder,'' and that there would be a ``grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush.'' Our children, he believed, ``will sing great songs about us years from now.''

He's done well in the private sector, with a multimillion- dollar house in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and a villa in Provence, France, although not without controversy.

Last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission told him he was under investigation after a report to Hollinger International Inc. shareholders said that Perle had ``flagrantly abdicated his duty'' as his friend, former Hollinger Chairman Conrad Black, looted the company like a ``corporate kleptocracy.'' The investigating committee asked Perle to return $5.4 million.

Wilkerson, a 31-year Army veteran who fought in Vietnam, spent the last 16 years working for Powell, a former general, and reveres him. Perle, by contrast views Powell as a ``wuss,'' according to the Associated Press, because of Powell's skepticism about the Iraq war. Since speaking out against the administration, Wilkerson's relationship with Powell, who has chosen to stay silent, is strained.

Wilkerson has done good, but not well. He lives in a townhouse in a Virginia suburb with his wife, who works in a gift and card shop. His son serves in Iraq. Although offered large sums to write a book and give speeches, he has chosen to teach.

Perle came out swinging, calling the film ``monstrously unfair'' to Cheney. The film showed how the government outsouces almost everything from peeling potatoes to supplying toilet paper, and if Halliburton Co., which Cheney headed before being elected vice president, demands no-bid contracts, it gets them, and then gets some more even after audits showed it bilked the government out of $100 million.

Perle said that Cheney doesn't favor his old buddies at Halliburton because he went to extraordinary lengths to divorce his fortunes from the company's by purchasing ``an annuity that pays him even if Halliburton goes under.''

A former officer with an Army pension, Wilkerson changed the subject back to the war, how on Sept. 12 the whole world was on our side, how bad it is that 1 percent is bleeding for the rest of us for trumped up reasons.

He revealed that just before they left the State Department, Powell had Wilkerson prepare a ``dossier, every memo, every call, on what happened,'' which Wilkerson is keeping in various undisclosed locations for safekeeping. After Perle denied Cheney had approved of torture, Wilkerson referenced a memo to prove he did. If only he would write that book.

If Perle is so enamored of annuities, he should buy one that insures compensation and consolation to Americans when the war goes under. Among other things, Eisenhower said ``God help this country when a president sits at this desk who doesn't know as much about the military as I do.''

A heartbeat away sits someone who does know as much, only the military-industrial complex has gained, not lost, power as a result. God help this country.

(Margaret Carlson, author of ``Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House'' and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: June 27, 2006 11:12 EDT