In the last decade, numerous film and print media treatments of the Second World War have focused on the “soldier’s perspective.” Because the wartime generation is now rapidly disappearing, postwar generations have become especially eager to know the war. In particular, there is a hunger to learn how it was experienced by ordinary servicemen—a focus popularized most effectively by historian John Keegan (and film directors such as Clint Eastwood, Oliver Stone, and Francis Ford Coppola). Scholars and war history buffs alike seek “reliable” accounts of the war; presumably, the best histories of the war are those that rest on a firm foundation of the most “reliable” sources. Certainly, the larger historical narrative of the war is incomplete without adequate attention to the personal records that servicemen kept at the time, such as diaries and letters. Nevertheless, like any document, it is essential to pay close attention to the assumptions shared by the authors of these documents and...

[Stanley Kutler is the editor of The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (Scribner's, 1995) and the The Wars of Watergate (Alfred A. Knopf). He is the E. Gordon Fox Emeritus Professor of American Institutions at the University of Wisconsin, and also professor of law.]

The good news is that George W. Bush at last has found parallels between his Iraq misadventure and the Vietnam War. The bad news is that he is again writing his own revisionist history. The president is on dangerous ground -- for both wars are based on a bed of lies and miscalculations.

American involvement in Vietnam escalated after an alleged attack on U.S. Navy vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964. The incident offered President Lyndon B. Johnson the pretext for expanding American involvement from an "advisory" role to combat operations. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney insisted in 2001 -- and ever since -- that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda, a charge without foundation. They...

Ever since Americans discovered that Islam still mattered, writers and film-makers have worked to meet the demand for knowledge about the history of that faith. Unfortunately, many of these accounts have been tendentious, and at their most extreme, they present a wildly romanticized Islamic Golden Age as a rhetorical counterpoint to an ignorant and bigoted Medieval West. This Occidentalizing trend reached its height in the starry-eyed 2002 PBS documentary Empires of Faith, which is still widely used as a teaching tool and an instrument of interfaith dialogue.

Judging by the latest PBS offering, Cities of Light, those very same film-makers have learned something in the interim, although they are still a long way from any semblance of historical objectivity. In its study of Islamic Spain, Cities of Light presented an unsurprisingly glorious image of a tolerant society in which all religions worked happily together under a benevolent Caliphate, a world in which Muslims,...

PERHAPS at the upcoming African Global Conference to be held here, one of the presenters will tell us why, with a Commission for Pan-African Affairs, a 90 per cent black population and a large Christian majority, black Barbadians know so little about the glorious role their foreparents played in early Christianity.

Or, about two of the oldest churches on the African continent and indeed the world – the Egyptian Orthodox Church established by St Mark the gospel writer in AD 58 and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, established AD 330.

It is ironic that while black priests here hardly breathe a word of history to their congregants, their leaders have extolled the two ancient Christian churches of Africa. For instance, former head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Paul VI, told the head of the Egyptian Orthodox Church on his visit to Rome in May 1973:

"You are indeed the head of the church whose origin goes back to the Evangelist Mark and which had...

[Richard Pells is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include "Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated and Transformed American Culture Since World War II." A longer version of this article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education.]

How did George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" reflect both the Jewish and African American experience in America? Why was Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" so influential for modern fiction and journalism? What was Abstract Expressionism, and why did Jackson Pollock become a cultural hero for many Americans in the 1950s? How did Marlon Brando's performance as Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire" transform American acting, first on stage and then in the movies?

If you are a college student taking a course in American history, you are unlikely to get the answers to any of these questions. The questions won't even be posed. Nor will the...

[Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He is a Vietnam War veteran.]

FINDING IN THE DEBACLE of the Vietnam War a rationale for sustaining the U.S. military presence in Iraq requires considerable imagination. If nothing else, President Bush's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars earlier this week revealed a hitherto unsuspected capacity for creativity. Yet as an exercise in historical analysis, his remarks proved to be self-serving and selective.

For years, the Bush administration has rejected all comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam. Now the president cites Vietnam to bolster his insistence on "seeing the Iraqis through as they build their democracy." To do otherwise, he says, will invite a recurrence of the events that followed the fall of Saigon, when "millions of innocent citizens" were murdered, imprisoned or forced to flee.

The president views the abandonment of our...

The latest flap, involving the Anti-Defamation League and its director Abraham Foxman, over Jewish recognition of Turkey's genocidal killing of Armenians during World War I is more pathetic than anything else.

It is sad and shameful that, under pressure from Israeli governments fearful of antagonizing the Turks, Jewish organizations in both Israel and the Diaspora have been so reluctant to acknowledge a historical truth that is well-documented and beyond serious challenge. Whether the Turks, who were fighting desperately to hold onto what was left of the Ottoman Empire, intended to kill every last Armenian they could hunt down, of whether they simply wanted to kill enough of them to make sure that Turkey no longer had an "Armenian problem" after the war, there can be no doubt that many hundreds of thousands, and probably well over a million, Armenians were deliberately murdered by them in the years between 1915 and 1918.

As understandable as may be...

Every August, assorted pacifists, lefties and other spotlight-lovers who want to make a show of how "peace loving" they are turn their attention toward Hiroshima and Nagasaki, genuflecting before nuclear weapons like the simian cult in "Beneath the Planet of the Apes."

There are, of course, no memorials for the millions of Chinese slaughtered by the Japanese (the incredible orgy of up-close-and-personal brutality known as the Rape of Nanking killed more people than both atomic bombs combined -- and, unlike the Bomb, it was up close and personal). And somehow we never hear any speeches about how we must "never again" see another Bataan Death March.

This points to a reflexive anti-Americanism among the kind of people who engage in this peculiar kind of historical mourning. But if that’s all there is to it, you might ask why no special liturgies for the greater numbers who died in the purely conventional firebombings of Tokyo by B-29s...

You can tell Bush is really getting desperate because now he himself is bringing up the Vietnam War.

But instead of recognizing it for what it was—a reckless imperial overreach, just like his own Iraq War—Bush twists the history of the Vietnam War to try to buttress the one he’s got us in now.

Check this out: He says we should have stayed in Vietnam longer.

“The price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens,” he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars. By the way, he’s counting the victims of the Khmer Rouge, who came to power only after the U.S. ruined Cambodia.

And he’s not counting the three million people the U.S. killed in Southeast Asia during that war....

It is, of course, amazing that Bush is even bringing up Vietnam.

Back on April 13, 2004 he was asked about the Vietnam analogy at a press conference.

But Bush did not want to hear anything about it. "The analogy is...