No End In Sight

A Reel Progress Screening

July 24, 2007, 7:00pm – 9:30pm

About This Event

Official Synopsis:

"A coolheaded, devastating expose" - Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
"Enraging...apocalyptic...masterful." - Rob Nelson, Village Voice

The first film of its kind to chronicle the reasons behind Iraq's descent into guerilla war, warlord rule, criminality, and anarchy, "NO END IN SIGHT" is a jaw-dropping, insider's tale of wholesale incompetence, recklessness, and venality. Based on over 200 hours of footage, the film provides a candid retelling of the events following the fall of Baghdad in 2003 by high ranking officials such as former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Ambassador Barbara Bodine (in charge of Baghdad during the Spring of 2003), former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell Lawrence Wilkerson, and General Jay Garner (in charge of the occupation of Iraq through May 2003), as well as Iraqi civilians, American soldiers, and prominent analysts.

"NO END IN SIGHT" examines the manner in which the principal errors of U.S. policy-the use of insufficient troop levels, allowing the looting of Baghdad, the purging of professionals from the Iraqi government, and the disbanding of the Iraqi military-largely created the insurgency and chaos that engulf Iraq today. How did a group of men with little or no military experience, knowledge of the Arab world, or personal experience in Iraq come to make such flagrantly debilitating decisions? "NO END IN SIGHT" dissects the people, issues, and facts behind the Bush administration’s decisions and their consequences on the ground to provide a powerful look into how arrogance and ignorance turned a military victory into a seemingly endless and deepening nightmare of a war.

Please join us for a provocative panel discussion and Q&A session immediately following the film during which panelists will discuss the film's deconstruction of the situation in Iraq. Featured Panelists:
Charles Ferguson, Filmmaker, "NO END IN SIGHT"
Nicholas Cull, Professor and Director of the USC Master's in Public Diplomacy
Gregory Treverton, Director, RAND Center for Global Risk and Security

Moderated by:
Brian Katulis, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress

Location

The Landmark
10850 West Pico Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90064

Biographies

Charles Ferguson is founder and president of Representational Pictures, LLC, and writer, director, and producer of "NO END IN SIGHT: The American Occupation of Iraq," which is his first film. Ferguson was originally trained as a political scientist. He holds a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, and obtained a Ph.D. in political science from MIT in 1989. Following his Ph.D., Ferguson conducted postdoctoral research at MIT while also consulting to the White House, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the Department of Defense, and several U.S. and European high technology firms. From 1992 to1994, Ferguson was an independent consultant, providing strategic consulting to the top managements of U.S. high technology firms including Apple, Xerox, Motorola, and Texas Instruments. In 1994, Ferguson founded Vermeer Technologies, one of the earliest Internet software companies, with Randy Forgaard. Vermeer created the first visual website development tool, FrontPage. In early 1996, Ferguson sold Vermeer to Microsoft, which integrated FrontPage into Microsoft Office. After selling Vermeer, Ferguson returned to research and writing. He was a visiting scholar and/or lecturer for several years at MIT and Berkeley, and for three years was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.

Professor Nicholas Cull is a faculty member of the USC Annenberg School and the School of International Relations and serves as the Director of the Master's in Public Diplomacy Program. He came to USC from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, where he was a professor of American Studies and Director of the Centre for American Studies. His research and teaching interests are broad and inter-disciplinary, centering on the developing academic discipline of public diplomacy, the role of culture, information, news and propaganda in foreign policy. He is author of the forthcoming American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989: The United States Information Agency and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press 2008). His first book, Selling War, (Oxford University Press, 1995), was named by Choice Magazine as one of the ten best academic books of that year. Cull earned both his B.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Leeds. While a graduate student he studied at Princeton University as a Harkness Fellow of the Commonwealth Fund of New York. From 1992 to 1997 he was lecturer in American History at the University of Birmingham. He is the co-editor of Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500-present (2003) which was one of Book List magazine's reference books of the year. He is also the president of the council of the International Association for Media and History, and has worked closely with the British Council's Counterpoint Think Tank.

Gregory Treverton is director of the RAND Corporation's Center for Global Risk and Security. Earlier, he directed RAND's Intelligence Policy Center and its International Security and Defense Policy Center, and he was associate dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School. His recent work has examined terrorism, intelligence and law enforcement, with a special interest in new forms of public-private partnership. He has served in government for the first Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, handling Europe for the National Security Council and, most recently, as vice chair of the National Intelligence Council, overseeing the writing of America's National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs). He holds an A.B. summa cum laude from Princeton University and an M.P.P (Master's in Public Policy) and Ph.D. in economics and politics from Harvard. His latest books are Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information, Cambridge University Press, 2001; and New Challenges, New Tools for Defense Decisionmaking (edited), RAND, 2003.

Brian Katulis is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. At the Center, his work examines U.S. national security policy in Middle East with a focus on Iraq. He is also a Senior Advisor to the Center's Middle East Progress project. Prior to joining the Center, Katulis lived and worked in the Middle East for the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, including projects in Egypt, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories. From 2000 to 2003, he worked as a senior associate at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. He has published articles in The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor among other publications. Katulis received a graduate degree from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs.

NO END IN SIGHT opens in New York and DC on Friday, July 27th, and will open in Los Angeles and other select cities in August.

For more on the Center's Reel Progress film series, please see: http://www.reelprogress.org