History doesn't repeat itself...

...but it does rhyme.

Orson Scott Card spends considerable looking at parallels between World War II and the current war on terror.

That was World War II. We take it for granted that Nazism was destroyed. We forget what a near thing it was.

Then he moves on to the mistakes we may be about to make in Iraq.

In fact, in one key way, we are living through the opposite of the run-up to World War II. America has a President who has taken the early action against the maniacs who seek world domination that Chamberlain refused to take.

But there are still some very important lessons we must learn:

1. When the press has decided to report only one side of the story, the public is ill served. If the British press had simply told the truth about what Hitler was doing, and reminded people of what Hitler had promised in Mein Kampf, it is likely that British public opinion would have been supportive of the early action that would have stopped Hitler without the devastation of World War II.

2. If you do not believe the threats of an insane enemy and destroy their war capacity early, when it can be cheaply done, you will pay for it in blood and horror.

3. Only fools believe that an enemy cannot do what he threatens to do.

4. Only fools allow their best allies to be neutralized before the war begins.

This is a big one. We could very easily lose most, if not all, of our allies by taking the wrong actions now.

if we do insane things like withdrawing from Iraq (which would be seen by everyone as a massive victory for Al-Qaeda and Iran and a proof that America cannot be relied on as an ally) or allowing Iran to develop nuclear weapons, then several things will certainly happen:

A. All the Muslim nations that have trusted us will immediately make friends with Iran or be toppled by Islamicist coups and revolutions.

B. Israel will be destroyed and its population slaughtered in a new holocaust. We might be able to bring out a few survivors.

C. Europe will be neutralized. Radical Islam will completely dominate the Muslim populations in European nations, and the governments will almost certainly bend their foreign policy to accommodate their demands. America will have no allies.

D. The world economic order, from which America skims its prosperity, probably would not endure. Oil still calls the shots, and Russia and China will join with Islam to marginalize or shatter the American economy. Never mind that the resulting worldwide depression would ruin their own economies. If America is brought down, they will feel like relative winners. And without America as a beacon of hope, what internal opposition would they have to worry about? None.

This is all easily foreseeable, even obvious. Outcomes A, B, and C would be inevitable, and while some optimists believe D could not happen, they merely underestimate the willingness of our enemies and rivals to hurt their own interests in order to bring us down.

We truly would be "America Alone" if this happened. And if outcome D occurred, we'd also be "America Emasculated". Reasonable people may disagree over how likely these outcomes are, but it seems to me, reasonable people have to ask, "how likely do they have to be?"

There's lots more – read the whole thing.