History doesn't repeat itself. Trying to avoid what are seen as the mistakes of the past can be a sure way of making a whole set of fresh mistakes, because the situation isn't the same.

As I read Thom Hartmann's piece, what he's doing is to stand on its head the stuff that's been churned out about how Saddam is just like Hitler and the lessons of the 30s, and so forth - and showing that it is perfectly easy to make the same kind of parallels between Bush and Hitler. Just as easy, and ultimately misleading.

Learning from the past can't be a mattere of drawing false analogies, and parachuting in policies from a science-fiction alternative history book. It's possible to learn from past mistakes, but it's a whole lot more complicated than that kind of thing.