This war, as set to their music

Barbra Streisand, the Rolling Stones and Green Day rarely hit the same note, but all of them are turning heads with new songs or videos about life in wartime.

Veteran songstress Streisand and spiky-haired punk trio Green Day have surprisingly synchronized videos that tug at the heartstrings by showing troops in harm’s way with lyrics about the lovers left behind on the home front. The Stones, meanwhile, veer into perhaps the band’s most specifically political song ever.

Pop music made headlines in the earliest days of the Iraq military operation with offhand comments from the stage (most memorably the Dixie Chicks) and songs in support of the operation (Toby Keith and other country stars), but in recent days three high-profile commentaries have come from disparate ends of the pop landscape.

Streisand’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” debuted Tuesday on a notable parcel of Internet real estate -- it will spend one week as an exclusive (and free) streaming video on the home page of merchant Amazon.com. It is culled from “Guilty Pleasures,” the singer’s upcoming collaboration album with Bee Gees singer Barry Gibb, who wrote and produced all the songs for the project, slated for a Sept. 30 release. Twenty-five years ago, the pair teamed for the Grammy-winning album “Guilty,” and its hits, among them “A Woman in Love” and the title track.

The video shows Streisand, wearing an evening gown and an intense expression, singing lyrics that include “You may be someone else’s sweetheart / Fighting someone else’s war, / And if you suffer for the millions / Then it’s what you’re fighting for.” The video intercuts her studio performance with footage of American troops shipping off to theaters of war past and present.

Politics is something the Stones typically haven’t done at all. “Street Fighting Man,” “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Undercover of the Night” had varying degrees of social or political imagery, but nothing like the new “Sweet Neo Con,” a song from their upcoming album “A Bigger Bang,” also due in September. The lyrics are pointed clearly at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., with its references to Halliburton and gasoline patriots. Among the lines: “It’s liberty for all / Democracy’s our style / Unless you are against us / Then it’s prison without trial.”

Jagger told The Times recently that commentary is not his forte but that with the protracted political crisis of the day, it’s hard to stay limited to less reflective topics.

“I think everyone cares to a greater or lesser extent about where they live and what problems people have,” Jagger said. “As a writer, you want to express that ... a rounded view. You don’t want to only have the swaggering thing.”

The video for Green Day’s “Wake Me When September Ends” is a seven-minute mini-movie with dialogue and battlefield scenes that create an elaborate companion plot for the hit song. Evan Rachel Wood and Jamie Bell portray a young couple whose love story is endangered by his combat deployment.

The video was conceived, written and directed by Samuel Bayer, whose resume includes more than 150 videos, including the watershed video for Nirvana’s song “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Bayer has called the small-form war tale his best work.

“I hope this video gets people talking,” Bayer said Tuesday. The song was written by Green Day front man Billy Joe Armstrong as an ode to his late father; Bayer came up with the idea of dovetailing the song with images from Iraq.

“I think you have to be very careful of public backlash when you deal with issues as sensitive as our foreign policy and the war in Iraq,” Bayer said. “Sometimes when musicians make antiwar statements it can sound crass and insincere. If you’re going to do this stuff, do it right.”