Islam and Western Civilization are going to come to blows. The fault line is there and the ground is shaking. Maybe things will settle down for a while or maybe it won’t. But the quake is coming.

History does have a way of repeating itself and the similarities you cite between March 1939 and November 2005 does give one pause.

One other similarity …

A Prince of Wales appealing to the U.S. and other powers to show restraint and appeasement toward a country that is demonstrating a hostile stance upon the world stage.

The most dramatic demonstration would be Villepin purging Sarkozy over the riots and Sarkozy winning the presidency anyway, under the NF banner.

Nuclear weapons do, of course, transfer disproportionate destructive power to a nation, however insignificant that nation may be in other ways. That’s a difference. We can’t dismiss a nuclear-armed Iran as easily as we would a conventionally-armed Iran.

As for Europe, the Europeans are in effect the sullen teenagers of the planet: they live in a secure world created for them by a hard-working parent - The US - and sit in their rooms playing the music loud and denouncing Dad as a fool or a bore or an authoritarian. Sometimes Dad is all of those things, but the Europeans are seldom able to rise to the level of adulthood.

One, my guess is that if the U.S. believes Israel is planning such a mission they would (quietly) use all their pull with the new Baghdad government to get them to look the other way. Of course, this is all assuming that the Iraqi military, as it stands now, is in any shape to prevent an Israeli jet or two from flying across Iraq in the first place.

I think there are shards of parallels. In a way, the dilemma of an existing power confronting a rising one, not yet openly threatening, is the same through history. Sparta watched warily while Athens built its fleet.

One important distinction, though, is that Europe’s two appeasements — seceding certain of its own neighborhoods and urban centers to Islamists, on the one hand, and playing diplomatic chess with the zealots in Iran on the other, are not quite tyhe same game.

The same mentality may underlie them, from Europe’s poiint of view: the shared attitude of the Franco-German elites that they have outgrown violence, that force is never an option, and sensitivity and diplomacy can disarm any enemy.

But the rioters in the Paris suburbs seem mostly to be North African, more thuggish than devout, and reflecting localized social resentment. The Shi’ite clerics of Iran have no control over them, and do not inspire them, except as each acknowledges the other as a power willing and able to stick a thumb in the eye of the hated secular/Crusader West.

Or, in other terms, they have as much in common as Saddam and Osama.

More worrisome is the London bombings. Those suicide bombers were English in every sense of the word but one, they were Moslems. But the only thing they had in common with other Moslems was that, like some in Iraq, Indonesia, and Palestine they blew themselves up in crowded public spaces full of innocent people.

The Iran thing is different. Not to defend the mullahs, but they see themselves as living in a dangerous neighborhood. India and Pakistan, and Israel as well, got a pass for developing nukes. If, as we all should hope, the mullahs were overthrown in a democratic revolution, the Iranian people might still want nukes because of their geopolitical situation.

There is no military solution to the problem of Iran’s nukes. I should think the Iranians have developed defenses against an Israeli air strike. In fact, were Saddam still in power, he might cynically have allowed the Israelis to fly across Iraq in order to take out Iran’s nukes, but a democratic, Shia-dominated Iraq would never allow this. So no country exists that has the will or the means to take out Iran’s nukes. Might as well live with it.

I believe the true turning point in this situation won’t be further escalation of rhetoric and threats of nuke technology, it will be a pre-emptive strike by one of the countries in that region. If the Israelis try another “Operation Babylon” it may very well result in a full-on regional war, with the rest of the civilized lining up and taking sides. Consequently, the same goes for if the Syrians or Iranians are finally busted cold hard supporting or carrying out a major terrorist attack.

The tension’s never been tighter right now and with the Iranians probably already having the nuke, the stakes are much higher.

Unfortunately, as in WWII, somebody innocent is probably going to have to die before the West decides to engage.