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In a July 18 article, columnist John Leo describes how David Koepp, screenplay writer for Stephen Spielberg's recently released "War of the Worlds," revealed his intent to draw a parallel between the U.S. military in Iraq, and the movie's villains, an army of hideous space aliens. Based on a late nineteenth-century science fiction novel by British author H.G. Wells, the original story involved an attack from inhabitants of the planet Mars, whose aim it was to conquer and inhabit the Earth.

Transposing the storyline from 1898 London to modern day New York, while still retaining a faithful portrayal of the original story, surely must have been a daunting task. Yet, to "die hard" Wells fans (as is this writer), the result was highly commendable, with one notable exception.

Now we know why that exception was made. Certainly the most hideous of weapons in the Martian arsenal was a poisonous gas, which was dispersed in order to kill over a widespread area, much like the nerve gas WMDs used by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds. In his zeal to condemn America, Koepp did not want to inadvertently remind viewers of Hussein's truly barbarous acts.

In a manner contradictory to Koepp's subliminal aims, the U.S. military was indeed portrayed in the movie. And in the only episode in which its purpose is actually stated, an on-scene commander explained his operation to stall the attacking invaders in order to allow sufficient time for earthly refugees to escape. In this, a far more vivid and characteristic image of America's armed forces was depicted.

Worse yet for Koebb and the Hollywood left, any correlations to modern America that viewers might draw from the invaders, are diametrically opposed to those apparently intended.

In the most graphic portrayal of the subhuman cruelty on the part of the invaders, a victim's lifeblood is gruesomely suctioned from him in a manner eerily similar to partial-birth abortion, the ultimate "sacred rite" of the counterculture.

Furthermore, the callous and cruel force with which the invaders conquered their domain, along with their inescapable peering "eyes" in the aftermath of their conquests, might instead remind viewers of Soviet tanks rolling through Prague and Warsaw.

Wells did advocate social concerns of his day. And certain of these may seem to align him with modern-day liberals. Yet, living and writing in the late nineteenth century as he did, he was not subject to the modern "orthodoxy" of "political correctness." He endeavored to observe the world around him and comment on it, either directly or through literary equivalence. Such intellectual honesty will inevitably place him on a collision course with the propagandistic thrust of leftist ideology.

In "The Time Machine," another Wells epic, he astutely characterizes the dehumanizing effects of the welfare state, whereby one segment of society maintains another segment as dependent and pliable, in order to continue feeding (literally) off of them.

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