As the United States stands poised at the brink of sending men into battle, the question from the Vietnam-era song comes up again: "What are we fighting for?" Many Americans apparently have qualms about the apparent crassness of our purpose: why should American boys, some are asking, shed their blood for cheap oil? But something more lofty, and more important, stands to be accomplished. We could be on the threshold of the most momentous achievement in the history of civilization: the creation of a world order ruled by something better than raw power. Never before, in ten thousand years of history, has there been such a thing as a coherent "world community" capable of dealing with the aggression of one society against another. As a result, power has been like a contagion: each society, having to face an aggressive neighbor on its own, must either match its enemy's power or be swallowed up. Iraq has devoured Kuwait on the assumption that the old rules still apply. It is up to the world community to establish that they don't. Already, the coherence and coordination of the international response have been unprecedented. Whether the world will, if necessary, be willing to use military means to enforce international law, through the United Nations, remains to be seen. Such a war, if it should come, would not be the same bad news that all other wars have been. In terms of loss of life, the tragedy would be the same. But all other wars have represented the further calamity of the breakdown of order into the anarchy of mere violence. A conflict of the World Community vs. Iraq, by contrast, would represent the upholding of order against the anarchy of intersocietal predation. Even in a well-ordered polity, the police must be able to use force to maintain justice. Imagine how liberating it would be for the more than one hundred small nations of the world if they could feel assured that the world community would protect them from expansionary neighbors. Billions of dollars that very poor countries now spend on armaments each year --out of fear-- could be saved for better purposes. Even the regional bullies and tyrants --the Saddam Husseins of the world-- would be dissuaded from squandering their national treasures on the instruments of imperialism, if they knew the world community would not let them get away with using them. The rescue of Kuwait, of course, would not by itself provide such comprehensive assurance about the reliability of a unified world response to aggression. Kuwait is not just any small country, but is a part of the system of petroleum production on which great powers depend for their economic vitality. There is no doubt that had these powers not seen their own vital interests at stake, the world response would have been condemnatory words at best. Does that mean that we are really fighting for oil, and that talk of world order is hypocritical or irrelevant? Not necessarily. Every building process must begin somewhere. And the very factors that keep the invasion of Kuwait from serving as a "limiting case" make it ideal for the establishment of precedent. Once the world community displays unshakable determination to get the Iraqis out of Kuwait, it will be that much harder to justify standing idly by when some other nation is violated, and that much easier to follow precedent and unify to protect even countries that are not indispensable to anyone's vital interests. The establishment of such a world order is, in fact, ultimately in everyone's vital interests. Even great powers like the United States that can defend themselves and occasionally profit from the rule of force. The anarchy of the world system has not only made history the bloody nightmare it has been, and not only wasted scarce resources on the means of destruction. Even more important, it has warped the entire course of the evolution of our civilized societies. It has severely restricted human choices about how to live. For any way of organizing human cultural life, if it made a society vulnerable to more mighty neighbors, has been swept aside, however beautiful or humane it might be. All peoples have been compelled to adopt the ways of power. The Chinese character for "crisis," it is often noted, combines the symbols for "danger" and for "opportunity." This crisis presents us with the opportunity to make a crucial step in a vital transformation of our civilized system. This transformation is, in fact, an old American dream. It was American vision that was at the forefront of the creation of the United Nations, at the end of World War II. The rise of the Cold War sundered these hopes. Many have suggested that the end of the cold war would create a vacuum of chaos that regional tyrants might fill with their imperialistic designs. Saddam Hussein sent his troops into what he assumed to be that vacuum. The world community now has the opportunity to define the direction of history, to demonstrate that the space created by the retreat of the Cold War is the occasion not for a retreat into anarchy but for progress toward a more just and secure world order. The more we represent our purposes in these terms, the more likely will the world community stay the course, even to the launching of a police action, should that prove necessary. Progress toward a coherent world order is as high a purpose as any for which we have fought in the past. Postscript: And if the world proves incapable of action? The rule of law is best but, as in the old Westerns, vigilante justice is probably better than no justice at all. We can at least form a posse to enforce what the Security Council has declared. Every building process must begin somewhere.

Andrew Bard Schmookler is the author of The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution.