A Tale of Two Wars & Two Presidents

And so on the second day of the seventh month of the fifth year of the war in Iraq, the final episode of Ken Burns' The War ran on PBS. This vivid mosaic of World War II at home and abroad was a big hit by public broadcasting standards, drawing the most viewers since an episode of Antiques Roadshow in 2000, although falling far short of prime-time heavy hitters like CSI and Desperate Housewives.

We have to take Burns at his word that The War was not intended as a counterpoint to the Iraq war, and indeed pre-production of the documentary did get underway well before the drive on Baghdad.

But in an era when the images and sounds that come through our ever larger TVs have an outsized ability to grab and hold our attention, The War is a powerful if unintentional indictment of today's war, and most notably the arrogance and folly of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the other members of the Neocon Poets Society.

Whether the men and women who fought and sacrificed in World War II were nobler than the men and women who fight and sacrifice today is not an issue, but the powerful message of "A World Without War," the ironically titled final episode of Burns' seven-part, 14½-hour documentary is unequivocal:

The GIs who landed on Omaha Beach in the D-Day invasion, who liberated Hitler's death camps in Austria and Germany, who fought to victory on Okinawa as their foxholes filled with the guts of thousands of killed and suicided Japanese, knew exactly what their war was about.

They were constantly reminded of what their war was about by President Roosevelt, a great man whose great ego was matched by an ability to inspire Americans to make the enormous sacrifices necessary to defeat a fascist demon that threatened to devour the planet and destroy our most precious freedoms.

The GIs who are fighting in the streets of Baghdad and the desert wastes of Anbar have only the vaguest idea of what their war is about.

They are constantly if unintentionally reminded of the core disingenuoisity of their war by President Bush, a small man who also has a great ego but cannot camouflage his failures of leadership behind flag waving and false analogies to FDR's war as he prattles on about the demon of the hour – first Saddam Hussein, then the insurgency, then Al Qaeda and now Iran – and whose war threatens to devour the Middle East and policies at home undermine those precious freedoms.