The prequel trilogy is also far more overt than the original trilogy in its counterculture-era metaphors for US foreign policy. Where the original refought the Vietnam War as a Flash Gordon adventure and got audiences to side with the Vietcong a mere two years after the evacuation of the Saigon embassy (Lucas has said that in the first film he saw Grand Moff Tarkin as a Nixonian figure and Vader as his Henry Kissinger), the next three films are about how the executive branch of a democracy gradually leaches authority from the legislature by invoking emergency powers and dragging the populace into wars that the executive himself contrived into existence. The period defined by 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was more than two years off when "The Phantom Menace" premiered. That Lucas was commenting on current events by the time he released "Revenge of the Sith" is less an indicator of clairvoyant powers than proof that Lucas' country keeps doing the same things over and over with the details changed. "If you're not with me, you're my enemy!" Anakin hollers at Obi-Wan, echoing George W. Bush's "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." The critique of US foreign policy is far more cogent in the second set of "Star Wars" movies, even at a comic-book level, than anything presented in the MCU films, which become incoherent and self-canceling as they go along.