Word: brutality
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...Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.And Monday’s incident is not the first time that Iraqis have complained about the aggressive, ruthless, and often senseless tactics of private contractors in Iraq. In fact, the complaints are commonplace and have been widely reported. In one brutal example, last Christmas Eve a drunken Blackwater employee shot and killed a security guard for a high-ranking Iraqi official. (The contractor made it to the U.S. Embassy, where he was extradited and has yet to be held accountable for any crime.)Further, Blackwater’s disregard...
...where he was temporarily reassigned, the chief suspects being four buddies with whom he served overseas. But In the Valley of Elah is not so much a whodunit as a whydunnit, an investigation of why a group of quite ordinary American soldiers would find themselves involved in such a brutal and essentially meaningless crime...
...groups with which the U.S. is cooperating in Anbar are not only outside of the Iraqi government; they are actively opposed to it, seeing it as a Shi'ite entity beholden to Iran. Such cooperation helps deal with the problem of al-Qaeda in Iraq - a brutal presence, to be sure, but still a minority element in the overall Sunni insurgency - but it doesn't necessarily reinforce national reconciliation...
Such cold-hearted prescriptions have shaped Machiavelli's reputation as the grand master of brutal pragmatism. But they reveal surprisingly little about the man himself - a statesman, poet, playwright and Florentine patriot who lived from 1469 to 1527. In his highly readable new biography, Machiavelli, Ross King paints a more complete picture of Florence's most misunderstood thinker and his tumultuous times. King's breezy narrative doesn't spare Machiavelli, depicting him as an intellectual who loved prostitutes as much as philosophy. But it does present the fresh and sympathetic hypothesis that Machiavelli may not, in fact, have been...
...Eastern Promises (a flaccid title for such a taut film) has some sensational set pieces: a barber-shop murder in the first few minutes, and a long, brutal fight in a bathhouse between Mortensen and two thugs; they're armed, he's naked. But at heart it's a two-family drama, one being Anna's sensible English aunt (Sinead Cusack) and crabby Russian uncle (Jerzy Skolimowski), the other Semyon and his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel). Kirill is like a mutant Corleone: he has Sonny's hair-trigger impulses and Fredo's drug-addled weak streak, stemming from a need...