Recently, while reading Walter Karp's book about how the United States came to be engaged in the Spanish-American War and in World War I (The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic [1890-1920]. New York: Harper and Row, 1979), I was struck by the many parallels with how the United States came to be engaged in the current war against Iraq.

To demonstrate these parallels, I took a number of passages from Karp's text and replaced the original persons, places, and dates with those pertinent to the present war, retaining the basic story line. The results appear in "Plus Ça Change . . . A Template for the U.S. War in Iraq," and "In Seeking War, George W. Bush Held True to Form."