Even to ask is to revisit some very old ideological battlefields.

The United Nations, in the Soviet view, was part of the ideological battlefield.

Mr. Clinton said that old ideological battlefields had been transformed into a marketplace of competing ideas.

Feminism, like every extremism and special interest, flourishes in a climate of electioneering, and Labour is gaining ground on the ideological battlefield.

Mr. Kadivar comes to this ideological battlefield armed with Koranic verses and complex theological scholarship.

But it is naive to imagine that the organization could appeal to world opinion over the heads of member governments who for 40 years have treated it as an ideological battlefield.

Primary education has always been an ideological battlefield, because it's what happens in those formative years that determines not just the path of further education, but the course of a child's life.

In addition, education has become more of an ideological battlefield in recent years because of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind initiative, which is requiring much more testing.

So now the ideological battlefield is littered with a number of often overlapping forces - Malthusians, feminists and developmentalists, as well as the moralists and economists of the New Right.

According to Moley what Hollywood had learnt was that 'when narrative art ventures on the ideological battlefield, it enters a dark and bloody ground' and that the safest bet was 'to stay on the broad highway of pure entertainment'.

One reporter even suggested that the politically charged punditry has been "misplaced": reviewers should have seized on the opportunity to take "a break from their usual fodder of public policy and foreign relations" rather than making an ideological battlefield of this "popcorn epic".