The "urban blitzkrieg" has begun. We watch the instant replay from Baghdad, acquiescing to the government expectation that we watch their performance, admire their technology and stifle our skepticism. Rumsfeld lectures the Iraqi people, warning them not to fight back, describing the advantages of deserting to the side of the "liberators." When asked if this were not an unusual procedure, a government spokesman assures us to the contrary, citing the example of Tokyo Rose in World War II. No irony intended. The regularity with which this campaign has been articulated in terms reminiscent of fascist and Nazi initiative is noteworthy.

The official who predicted an "urban blitzkrieg" seemed oblivious to the fact that he was using the language of a nation we defeated in 1945 and humiliated at Nuremberg. The plan to drop more ordnance on Baghdad than were used on Iraq in the entire Gulf War in 1992 has been described as a campaign of "shock and awe," the point of which is to "break the will" of the nation. Bush is quick to assure the Iraqi people that we do not mean to hurt them, only their evil leader. Though this assurance may be less than consoling to those who are killed or maimed by our initiative, our leader is not a man to be troubled by contradictions or uncertainties. Not in the habit of distinguishing between abstractions, such as "nation" and concrete entities, such as the bodies of actual Iraqis, he does not stop to consider that you cannot "break the will" of a nation. You can only "break the will" of a person, and you do that by inflicting pain on his or her body. In fact, the phrase "to break the will" was a great favorite of the punitive nineteenth-century pedagogues who produced the culture of the nation which led the world into all-out global conflict twice in the twentieth century. Rather than criticize that nation for courageously opposing the current "march of folly," we ought to praise Germany for the wisdom it has gleaned from the rack of history. Unfortunately, we prefer to repeat the pathologies of our former enemy, rather than admire its achievement of health. There was, for example, no more telling symptom of the unhealthy will to dominate in nineteenth-century culture than the reliance on ultimatums.

An ultimatum is a threat of overwhelming force as a punishment for non-compliance with an order. It is often delivered by a stronger party to a weaker one, as for instance, by a parent to a child: "If you don't eat your broccoli, I'll take off my belt and teach you a lesson." Although such commands would seem to be peculiarly inappropriate when delivered by one sovereign nation to another, they hold a place of privilege in the histories of both World Wars. In 1914, the Austrian government, smarting over the assassination of the Archduke, issued an ultimatum to the Serbians. The direct consequence of this particular case of responding to a terrorist attack with a belligerent ultimatum was World War I. Thus, as George Bush has regularly confronted Iraq with demands totally lacking in the first principle of statesmanship--not to back your opponent into a corner--the words of my high school History teacher, Mrs. Smith, on the causes of World War I echoed in my head: "You don't issue ultimatums. The other guy is unlikely to comply with them, and when he doesn't, you will have to do what you said you would do." Of course, Mrs. Smith’s observations were based on the assumption that no sane person would really want to go to war. Her advice would not apply in situations where the whole point of the ultimatum is to use non-compliance as an excuse to strike, for example, when Hitler issued an ultimatum to the Austrian government in anticipation of invading Austria. Little would poor Mrs. Smith have imagined that the day would come when the United States of America would issue ultimatums precisely in the expectation that the other guy would not back down, thus affording us a window of opportunity to clobber him.

With what righteous indignation did we lend our voices to the chorus of those who were appalled by the mindless violence of the Taliban, when it destroyed the giant ancient Buddhas in the desert a few years ago! Such violence against sacred monuments is, indeed, disgusting, though not without historical precedent, as any visitor to the Parthenon can tell you. But then there were no people in those giant Buddhas. We, however, are talking about bombing one of the world's most ancient cities, a city on the Tigris River, not only full of mosques, minarets and monuments, but inhabited by six million living people. When told that Baghdad was on the Tigris River, one of my students, recalled that the Tigris-Euphrates valley was the cradle of civilization and asked: "Are we going to bomb the Garden of Eden?" Unlike my student, George Bush prides himself on the fact that he is not a reader, and his belligerent policies seem all the more remarkable in view of his utter lack of historical or personal perspective on the experience of war. The concept of "preventive war" which Bush and his advisors are flaunting as the inspiration of the age is not a new idea--in fact it is very old. Jonathan Schell notes that Dwight Eisenhower rejected this idea as unacceptably outdated in 1953 when some of his advisors suggested a “preventive war” against Stalin's Soviet Union. Speaking with considerably more authority on the subject of war than George Bush will ever have, Eisenhower observed: "All of us have heard this term 'preventive war' since the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time I heard it. In this day and time . . . I don't believe there is such a thing; and frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing" (The Nation, March 3, 2003).

Whereas the voice of wisdom would reject both the policy of issuing ultimatums and the program of an "urban blitzkrieg," the current administration rushes eagerly from diplomatic fiasco to military initiative, mindlessly oblivious of the fact that this scenario has been enacted before, by others who dismissed the possibility that military initiative might lead to global disaster. When will the self-styled masters of the new world order learn that there is no future in reaping the whirlwind? When will the rest of us tire of sitting in front our TV sets, regarding international catastrophe as a spectacle provided for our entertainment?

Lillian Corti is a professor of English at the University of Alaska

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