As people and parts fly off the sinking ship of state; as casualties and costs mount abroad; as crime, corruption and cover-up generate a sordid rainbow on a growing oil-slick of incompetence; with ever increasing irony the President invites us to embrace him as a 21st century Winston Churchill, with Saddam Hussein as Hitler, and the war in Iraq as the moral equivalent of World War II. Mr. Bush, his Vice President, and their well-meaning enablers would have us believe, that they, and they alone, see the world as it is; that they alone see God's own truth; and that they alone can protect our country and the world against fools, appeasers, and whatever they're calling the enemy this week.

Forget the obvious ironies: that our President would be hard pressed to read one of Mr. Churchill's speeches aloud, much less write one, or that Iraq's late dictator ruled a thoroughly run-down, disunited country with a population some 8 million smaller than metropolitan Tokyo. Forget the 20 million soldiers and 40 million civilians killed in World War II. Forget the First War, and those lost in the global influenza pandemic that followed it, and the human and financial devastation of the Great Depression.

Remember instead that the Second war was a consequence of the First . . . and that the First War's bungled peace triggered a cascade of consequences that shaped, among other things, the Second World War and Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, and all the troubles that have plagued the Middle East since the fall of the Turkish Empire. What Bush faces is not the Battle of Britain, but the aftermath of Versailles . . . and, irony of ironies he emulates the French.

After the Great War, despite victory, France and her leading politicians lived in fear and anger, and governed accordingly. Unlike Mr. Bush, however, they had good reason to do so. French losses in the first war were so great that its leaders refused to report casualty figures publicly for nearly a decade. They filled their armies with troops from abroad. They paid mothers to have children. They built a wall along their border. Ironically, the French feared a shattered enemy. That fear, understandable though it was, helped destroy Wilson's dream of a just peace; produced an occupation that further discredited German democracy; and shaped policies that empowered the most vicious critics of France's own best hope for a peaceful future, the fragile new German Weimar Democracy.

By 1933, the German economy had been destroyed not once, but twice; France's two most important allies had all but abandoned her; and Germany's new Chancellor, playing upon his own people's humiliation, anger, and fear, had launched a domestic war on "terrorism." The Nazis defined their enemies early, and in terms French policy helped define. The new "enemies" were all those who could be associated, rightly or wrongly, with the lost war, the "French" occupation, a destroyed economy, and a failed government. They were communists, liberal democrats, the Catholic "center," and, eventually, even the conservative parties of the traditional German right.

Ironically, our President's words and actions in the Islamic world are less echoes of Churchill in 1940 than Poincare in 1919 and 1923. He empowers the enemies the fears most, and sows the seeds of authoritarianism. Iraqis, most of them now under 25 years old, will tell stories of the American occupation to their children's children. They will speak of its toll in lives and treasure; remember its grinding incompetence and the hapless Iraqi governments it produced; and perhaps most important, they will denounce for generations the humiliation it represented to them, to Iraq and to Islam.

Proponents of an Iraqi secular democracy will be denounced as collaborators and enemies of the state. If the territorial integrity of the country can be preserved at all, only a new strong man will be able to unite Kurd, Sunni, and Shia under a new Iraqi flag. Guess which enemies that strong man will denounce, at home and abroad. Guess which allies he will attract.

The war in Iraq is not the Battle of Britain; it's Versailles, reparations and the Ruhr. And Bush is no Churchill; at best he's a dim shadow of the well-meaning, misguided Raymond Poincare.