"Lets see. There's this one country which is stock-piling weapons of mass destruction and hell bent on attacking another country.

And then there is Iraq..."

A letter in Friday's Guardian expands on what Bagpuss said up the thread:

There are analogies between the international situation now and in the 1930s (Searching for a new hero: why America has turned to Winston Churchill, August 29). Then, as now, a minority political clique gained control of a great military and economic power, after an ambiguous and manipulated electoral process. Then, as now, they used propaganda to amplify a burning, but unfocused, sense of popular insecurity and grievance. Minorities were scapegoated - then socialists and Jews, now Muslims.

Then as now, international agreements and obligations were set aside, as, increasingly, were aspects of the rule of law, while the major supranational organisation was too weak and disunited to act effectively. Threats and grievances were amplified in the public mind to justify aggression. Thus, domestic opinion was carried along in the rush to re-armament and war, the opposition cowed into silence by the fear of appearing unpatriotic.

(For the rest of that letter, by a Dr EC Hulme of St Albans, Herts, click here.)