The freshest historical analogy of the week belonged to President Bush in his fine prosecutorial brief at the United Nations. The president is a reluctant multilateralist, but he craftily placed the credibility of the United Nations at the center of the debate with his reference to the League of Nations. The league was all talk, no action against fascism. Bush argued that the United Nations now risks becoming “irrelevant” if it won’t enforce its resolutions.

At first glance, the comparison between Saddam and Hitler seems overdrawn. Hitler, after all, was gobbling up countries, while Saddam has been staying quiet abroad since invading Kuwait a decade ago. But this has become a useless distinction. Because terrorism knows no borders, it has rendered obsolete the age-old standard of what constitutes a grave threat to world peace–namely, “territorial aggression.” It used to be that if dictators or totalitarian regimes were “contained” in their own space, then the defensive policy could be called a success. Unfortunately, “containment” is much less meaningful than before September 11.

So is “deterrence.” The common dovish notion that Saddam will not use his weapons of mass destruction because “he has a return address” ignores the ability of regimes like his to transfer such weapons to terrorists without leaving fingerprints–what Bush calls a “shortcut” to wreaking havoc.

Many Democrats are getting wise to this, and not just out of political fear. “I don’t want to wake up one day and say, ‘A weapon of mass destruction was used and we didn’t do all we could to stop it’,” says House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, who gave an important speech last June laying out the Democratic hawkish line. In this analogy, Hitler’s territorial ambitions and Saddam’s WMD ambitions are fully comparable.

But Gephardt also doesn’t want to wake up one day and wonder why–after taking out Saddam–we suddenly forgot about Iraq. After only a few months, Afghanistan is off the American radar scope. Like a lot of other Democrats on Capitol Hill, Gephardt says he’s worried about the “single-minded” nature of American policy. Iraq is blotting out not just the Democrats’ domestic agenda, but other important elements of the war on terror. If Bush is so worried about nukes, why did he have to pass the tin cup to Ted Turner’s Nuclear Threat Initiative to pay for the recent removal of fissile materials from the Balkans?

Democrats (and a few Republicans) are worried about giving Bush a blank check on Iraq, as Congress gave LBJ on Vietnam after the trumped-up Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964. A better approach might be to say, “Look, we’ll buy the Hitler comparison if you sign off on a Marshall Plan analogy, where we explain to the public just how long and costly it will be to secure and rebuild Iraq.” Because Bush was so contemptuous of Clinton-era “nation-building,” a parlor game is underway to give that crucial activity another, more palatable name. Gephardt suggests “advancing democratic values,” but that sounds too… Democratic. Maybe “republic-building” would work better in Republican Washington. It doesn’t matter what they call it as long as they do it.

Because he was less of a political animal than his son, former president Bush did not ask for a binding congressional resolution on the Persian Gulf War until January of 1991, after the midterm elections and 22 months before the next one–plenty of time for people to forget that 47 senators voted against it. Dubya will have no such mercy on the Democrats. Even though the war probably won’t start until December at the earliest (before that, it’s too hot for American soldiers wearing biochem-protective clothing), the GOP, following Karl Rove’s game plan for winning back the Senate, will force a vote as soon as possible.

Some Democrats are floating the idea of trying to push the vote off on the lame-duck Congress in November. That is wimpy and wrong: defeated or retired members of Congress have never before declared war, and they shouldn’t now. Instead, Congress should be standing up for a tough but smart policy: no relief for the international outlaw, no blank check for an American president to wage endless war, no bull about the costs and perils of what lies ahead. Then maybe we can actually say we’ve learned at least a few of history’s lessons.