So who lost Spain? Who thereby gave Old Europe a new lease on life? When Americans were told that toppling Saddam's regime would transform geopolitics, did anyone think that the next transformed regime would be José María Aznar's -- that "regime change" would ricochet back to Spain? The Bush administration was taken by surprise, of course, because it had chosen to ignore the huge majorities in democracies around the world who never agreed that the "war on terror" could be won in Baghdad.

President Bush pushed the Spanish -- and will soon push, probably, the British -- to change their government by pursuing policies that have cleaved Europe and America. Europeans, remembering centuries of experience in stomping out separatists, anarchists and fanatics, will now go their own way, without guidance from Paul Wolfowitz. French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, looking like two cats who shared a canary, held a joint press conference in Paris on Tuesday touting their own approach to fighting terrorism; there they offered words of welcome to incoming Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, inducting him into their non-American -- maybe anti-American -- alliance. David Frum bewailed Europe's collective-security plan as "a defeat for the antiterrorist cause," and yet Western Europeans have concluded that stirring hornets nests in faraway places is not the way to keep from being stung.

Which brings us to Tony Blankley in the Washington Times, who gloomily projected a "four in 10 chance that the American electorate will come down with the Spanish disease this November" -- that is, boot Bush out of office; the alleged ailment might be called "appeasementitis." Yup, it's 1938 all over again, same as it ever was. The historically minded -- here comes the dreaded alternative diagnosis of the realists -- might point out that al-Qaida is a criminal gang, a cadre of loony loners and conspiratorial crazies scattered across the world. These realists understand that bin Laden's bunch is not a nation-state with a Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, and Fuhrer. But no speck of realistic thinking seems ever to cloud the eternal 1930s-ness of the neocons' spotless mind.

Indeed, the most serious consequence of appeasement-accusing is the assumption that goes with it: That counterterrorism strategy and conventional war strategy are one and the same. The war on terror is not World War II; it requires dramatically different actions. The neocon strategists, stalled in the '30s -- searching for Neville Chamberlain tapping his umbrella on every cobblestone street, even as they scout out the next Winston Churchill -- are leading us into the bloody land of blowback.