While the big news of the day is the discovery by British authorities of a bomb plot aimed at airliners flying from the U.K. to the U.S., there are a lot of other interesting things going on.

The Israeli cabinet has authorized, finally, an expansion of the ground campaign in southern Lebanon, but not without a great deal of wrangling, according to some reports. Meanwhile, there is a report that the Israelis found the bodies of ten Iranian Revolutionary Guards soldiers among Hezbollah dead in southern Lebanon. If this is true, then there can be no more doubt (if there ever was any) that Iran is directly involved in the conflict (somewhat reminiscent of the German "volunteers" who fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War).

John Batchelor is also thinking of historical parallels in this column.

David Warren has some anecdotal evidence to conclude that some Canadians, at least, are waking up the war they are fighting, even if most are not yet ready to admit it.

David Bernstein says civilian casualties are part of the price we pay in fighting terrorism.

Richard Holbrooke brings up the "Guns of August" analogy, as others have done over the last few week.

Joel Rosenberg ponders the significance of August 22, as we await the Iranian government's response on the nuclear issue.

Arnaud de Borchgrave also has an overview of the state of the world in these troubled times.

No historical analogy is perfect, of course. Thus, each analysis that compares this troubled month of August to August of 1914 or August of 1939 is problematic. But there are lessons to be learned from studying each of those periods. In the first, European leaders set into motion a series of events, each escalation leading to further escalation, until all the war plans were put into effect and all the armies were on the march. Once they clashed and the rivers of blood began to flow, it was impossible for the leaders to do anything but try and fight it out to a victorious conclusion, which was not reached until four years had passed and millions had died. In the second, European leaders, desperate to prevent a repeat of the bloodletting of the Great War, as they called it then, tried over and over again to appease the desires of the messianic madman who had taken the reins of power in one of Europe's most powerful nations. Only at the end did they finally realize that he could not be appeased, but by then they were forced to take his hammer blows, and Europe came perilously close to descending into a new Dark Age which could have lasted for decades or even centuries. Only the perseverance of a man named Winston Churchill and the stouthearted Britons he lead, and the fatal decision by Hitler to attack Russia and, later, declare war on America, kept that Dark Age from lasting longer than four years.

The international political situation of today bears some similarities to both historical instances, but also has some significant differences. First and foremost is the fact that the ideology which dominates the factions determined to make war on the West is not limited to one nation. Islamist thought is diffused throughout the Muslim world, which makes it a truly global phenomenon, which was never the case with Naziism. That makes the movement far more dangerous than the Nazis ever were in the battlefield of ideas. On the other hand, the Islamists do not have control of a country with the power of a Nazi Germany. Iran is powerful, but they are not in the same league as the Germany of 1939-45. This fact may change with the passage of time, and it may not be relevant given the messianic views of President Ahmadinejad.

While Hitler had a vision of a "Thousand Year Reich" built through conquest, Ahmadinejad has visions of an apocalypse preceding the return of the "Hidden Imam". Like the generals of 1914, Ahmadinejad, and the Ayatollah Khamenei behind him, may have a plan of action based on their religious beliefs which, once set into motion, will cause all the other actors to put their plans into motion (which we may be already seeing in southern Lebanon).

What can the U.S. do about it? If Ahmadinejad is really determined to spark a global war, I doubt very seriously that there is anything of a diplomatic or economic nature that the U.S. and its allies can do to stop him. Then, like the Europeans in 1914 or the Americans in December of 1941, it will just be a matter of fighting it through to victory, although the cost may be even more terrible than what was experienced in those wars.