JOSEPH LIEBERMAN, Democratic senator from Connecticut and independent candidate for a new term, shared a remarkable insight in Hartford on August 22. He commented, in an interview with talk radio host Glenn Beck, "Iraq, if you look back at it, is going to be like the Spanish Civil War, which was the harbinger of what was to come."

The Spanish strife of 1936-39 remains, seventy years after it began, one of the central incidents of the century we lately left behind. And it offers numerous precedents for the global war on terror.

Lieberman probably intended to express little more than the standard informed opinion on Spain's war--that the Western democracies made the Second World War in evitable by failing to save the Spanish Republic from rightist dictator Gen. Francisco Franco, who was a proxy for Hitler and Mussolini.

The aptness of the Spain-Iraq parallel has struck others. The same day as Lieberman made his comment, a British paper, the Citizen, editorialized: "[T]he Spanish Civil War, besides presaging the Second World War, had important repercussions. . . . [T]hose who question what has happened today in recent zones of conflict, especially Israel-Lebanon, could do no better than undertake a revisitation of history which could teach all of us some useful lessons about the threats of fascism, totalitarianism and religious extremism." Labour member of the House of Commons Denis MacShane, who happens to be the biographer of former Tory prime minister Edward Heath, recently argued that Britain should have intervened in Spain on the side of

Similarly, on August 18, Heritage Foundation analyst Ariel Cohen, writing in the Washington Times, compared pro-Hezbollah demonstrators in Washington to the "Fifth Column . . . the pro-fascist forces in Republican Madrid during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Today's Fifth Column glorifies the global jihad against the West." And a few days before that, radical Islam expert Daniel Pipes, on the Lou Dobbs show, likened the Hezbollah-Israel war to "the Spanish Civil War as a precursor to World War II."

The argument is a powerful and correct one, although it has its subtleties and flaws. First, Iraq is not now in a state of civil war. Wide-scale, continuous combat between major internal forces has not started in Iraq. And it may not, thanks to the overwhelming demographic weight of the Shia Muslims, a majority of whom are committed to the new Iraqi state.

But the analogy with the Spanish Civil War does not depend on the existence of an unrestrained military struggle between Iraqi factions. The Spain-Iraq parallel contains a deeper lesson for the present. The Spanish Civil War was the first major example of the modern phenomenon of proxy wars, in which local clashes are exploited, and third countries torn apart, in the competition between regional and global alliances. Spain was not a simple war of conquest and pillage, like the contemporaneous Japanese invasion of China and Italian assault on Ethiopia. Rather, Spain represented a confrontation between the politics of the past, represented by Franco, and the politics of the future, embodied in a confused but nonetheless genuine Republic.