Paul Greenberg in the Washington Times says it's a Return to the 1930's:
History keeps coming back, sometimes like a bad dinner. In case you missed the '30s, you could experience it again last week watching the Security Council at the United Nations, which begins to bear an uncanny resemblance to the late League of Nations.Yikes! I hope some Iraqi working in a pharmaceutical factory doesn't try to make his own cough syrup!
Listening to the calm, neutral, simultaneous translation of the Security Council's proceedings over calm, neutral, simultaneous NPR, one was struck by how exactly this attempt to disarm Iraq paralleled the world's efforts in the 1920s to make Germany disarm - in compliance with that defeated country's obligations under the Versailles Treaty.
Both regimes swore they were complying. And both were engaged in purely a paper exercise. An old joke, circa 1930: A German who works in a perambulator factory decides to sneak out the parts one by one so he can build his own baby buggy at home, but every time he puts all the parts together, all he gets is a machine gun.
