You know the feeling. As you read a novel, you just keep thinking: "Hey, this rings a bell . . . that pig, is he a bit like Trotsky?" Or "all that stuff about growing and shrinking, it is almost as if Alice is pubescent."

And then it dawns on you that it is all just a clever allegory. As you close the book, you congratulate yourself on having got it, and smile knowingly at your own cleverness.

Last week, it happened to me backwards. Instead of fiction resonating with reality, I found reality mirroring fiction. After reading Bob Woodward's Bush at War, an opus on the current White House and its response to 11 September, certain themes struck me as awfully familiar.

So, in a desperate attempt to understand my own psychosis, I present ten suspicious parallels between the War on Terror and The Godfather trilogy.

1. Both have a rich and powerful family at their centre, fighting a war to ensure their own continued dominance.

2. Both are incredibly violent.

3. Both feature an enemy that will blow up cars and kill innocent people in their attempts to damage the Family.

4. Neither begins in earnest until a terrible peace time attack on the Family and their interests leads to a growing desire for revenge, and the Family's son – who incidentally looked lovely in his nice military uniform – needs to prove to all the doubters that he is a strong leader in his own right. But you cannot get rid of this lingering feeling that he just wants revenge for what they did to his dad.

5. As the war continues, your sympathy ebbs and you begin to suspect that what the son puts forward as strong leadership is, in fact, a form of psychotic megalomania. When a whole new round of killing begins a couple of years after the original attack, you begin to wonder what kind of monster this guy really is, and whether anyone can stop his crusade for absolute power.

6. Slowly, it dawns on you that Junior is much more frightening than his father ever was. Where the father understood the value of leading through respect and co-operation, the son knows only how to use violence and fear – leadership at the barrel of a gun. Suddenly, the old man starts to look pretty cuddly by comparison.

7. You instinctively support the Family's side, but you have this sneaking suspicion that if they had not have been so aggressive in the first place, they would not be in this mess.

8. As the war continues, anyone that betrays the Family finds themselves utterly destroyed – politically or literally.

9. Despite the escalating violence, nobody seems to know what would constitute a victory. And, in your heart of hearts, you know the killing is not going to stop any time soon.

10. You know that if they attempt another instalment, it will be an unmitigated disaster.