[KilgoreTrout]

My beef with WWII documentaries is that none of them tells the whole story that ties the roots of WWII to today's conflicts. Even Wold at War starts with the Battle of the Atlantic, IIRC.

To wit: the British and American deal to grant Iraq the appearance of independence in the late 1930's while retaining control of Iraqi oil production that lead to a failed coup in Iraq and armed conflict. Colonialism may not be as dead as we think.

Little is said in most WW2 documentaries of the Stalin/Hitler prewar agreements vis the partitioning of Poland and Finland or the whacky German strawman attacks said to have been conducted by Poland that Hitler used as a premise. And the series of wars between the Russians and Japanese in the early 20th century, fought over warm water ports and colonial ambitions, planted the seeds for the Sino-Japanese war that led to the outbreak of widespread war in the Pacific theater in 1937 - the start of WW2.

WWII converted US production into a war machine. Recall Eisenhower's farewell address. He cautioned against a sustained "military-industrial complex" and its ambitions. Haliburton, Blackwater, Raytheon, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush are all precisely what Ike told us to watch out for.

We could very well be on the precipice of another global conflict. There are many similarities between Ahrmadinejad and Hitler. Iran even has a fuhrer: Ayatollah Khamenei.

All this stuff interests me, but by far the concept of Total War is the most fascinating. That is the difference between WW2 and all other modern conflicts.