Unlike most of the people I know and work with, I've supported the invasion of Iraq -- reluctantly, fretfully, ruefully supported it, but more in favor than against. And so as it looked this week that the war may end soon, and may not end too badly, I mentally gave two cheers.

And, of course, I watched the TV coverage even more obsessively than I had before. Those live pictures on Wednesday of Iraqis celebrating in Baghdad, and pulling down that giant statue of Saddam, and waving the American flag were dumbfounding, as dramatic as any scene I've ever seen in a movie.

And then came a commercial break, and all the standard news-channel war show packaging.

The swirling titles. The quick-cut montages. The dramatic instrumental theme music.

WHY do news executives feel they need to hype the mood like this? Do they actually think we wouldn't be interested in watching if it isn't made to look and sound like…entertainment? It's at least a lapse in taste -- and maybe something worse -- if viewers, especially kids, start understanding real war and real death as hardly different from the video-game versions.

And some of the fighters themselves are clearly seeing this war through the scrim of pop-culture.

Like when three companies of British Royal Marines advanced one dawn into the city of Basra….a mission they officially called Operation James….as in James Bond.

After the reports early in the war of Iraqi civilians shooting down a US Blackhawk helicopter, I saw another news report that Iraqi military officers may have, before the war began, actually screened a copy of the Ridley Scott film "Blackhawk Down".

Mark Bowden, wrote the book "Blackhawk Down", on which the film was based. Last year, I remember, Bowden wrote a profile of Saddam Hussein for the Atlantic Monthly that included an account of his cultural diet.

The piece reported that Saddam loves watching Hollywood movies. He particularly likes thrillers involving conspiracy and assassination-including "The Day of the Jackal", "The Conversation", "Enemy of the State" …and "The Godfather".

It has also been reported that Kim Jong-Il, the North Korean dictator, is a big film buff- and that he also loves, yes, "The Godfather".

I learned this about Kim Jong-Il from John Ellis, a writer I know who is also a Senior Fellow studying terrorism at the U.S. Military Academy. John has what he calls a "half-baked theory"-- that Kim Jong-Il's recent anti-American saber-rattling may be due to….having seen a movie, specifically the most recent James Bond film, Die Another Day.

In "Die Another Day", the North Korean super-villain kills his own father. John seriously wonders if maybe Kim Jong-il saw the Bond film this winter and now, as a result, thinks the Bush Administration ordered up this plot twist to slander him.

As I was contemplating that bizarre speculative intermingling of fantasy and reality, I happened to see Kiefer Sutherland on the Today show. On the TV series "24", Sutherland plays an anti-terrorist agent trying to stop Islamic terrorists from detonating a nuclear device in America. On the Today show, he said he just wishes life could go back to the way it was before entertainment and the news got so confused.

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