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About Schmidt, directed by Alexander Payne

C I N E M A <> C L A S S I C S
Cyrano RATING: ****

BY JOANNE LAURIER | WSWS : Arts Review : Film Reviews 17 January 2003

A LIFE’S LABOR LOST
About Schmidt directed by Alexander Payne; written by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, based on the novel by Louis Begley

About Schmidt is about Warren Schmidt, a middle-aged, Middle American in a post-career crisis. The latest film by Alexander Payne (Election, Citizen Ruth) scrutinizes features of America’s social fabric with a relatively sharp eye. [Read more →]

Harvard’s Humanitarian Hawks


Don’t be misled by all that pomp and circumstance and ivy…like all centers of plutocratic power Harvard is often an accomplice in imperial projects…if not the actual incubator.

BY TOM HAYDEN
DATELINE: THE NATION 9.14.07

Should a human rights center at the nation’s most prestigious university be collaborating with the top US general in Iraq in designing the counter-insurgency doctrine behind the current military surge? [Read more →]

The Iraq War As We See It—Seven U.S. Soldiers Speak

Dateline: Published on Sunday, August 19, 2007 by the International Herald Tribune

“Pacifying” Iraq has proved not just elusive but a costly nightmare with no end in sight. The truth on the ground that most American media continue to fudge about.

VIEWED FROM IRAQ at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is surreal.

Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. [Read more →]

U.S.-IRAQ: Fallon Derided Petraeus, Opposed the Surge


Gen. Petraeus…”ass-kissing little chickenshit” and wholly owned subsidiary of Bushco. Careerism, as usual, trumps duty.
BY GARETH PORTER
Dateline crosspost: 9.14.07 / http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39235

WASHINGTON, Sep 12 (IPS) - In sharp contrast to the lionisation of Gen. David Petraeus by members of the U.S. Congress during his testimony this week, Petraeus’s superior, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), derided Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad last March, according to Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting. [Read more →]