The Jungle's Biggest Lion

Michael Tomasky's weekly column looks ahead to the beginning of a new global Darwinism. Excerpt:

"It seems likely -- and we should all hope, for humanity's sake and our country's -- that we'll win this war, that Saddam Hussein will be retired from active duty, that hard evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in his Iraq will turn up (and hopefully be destroyed before they find their way to the black market), and that the Iraqi people will probably, to one degree or another, be better off under whatever comes next. Bush will benefit from these developments, a fact that brings me no joy. But we must admit that these are all very good things, and liberal opponents of the war need to acknowledge them -- along with the fact that, let's face it, the United Nations was not enforcing its resolutions against Iraq, and only the pressure applied by this administration made it begin to do so.

But the following is true as well, and it is not a very good thing at all. Most Americans aren't thinking this far ahead, and the administration's rah-rah corner is not very interested in the subject, but: History will not end the day the white standard is run up the flag poles of Hussein's palaces. People and societies have memories, and they will remember the staggering number of distortions and pieces of misinformation that helped set this war in motion. They'll remember the administration saying that it would seek the imprimatur of a second UN resolution, and they'll remember the "no lunch, please, we've only got an hour" summit at which that pledge was tossed out the window. They'll remember Colin Powell's "hard evidence" presented at his Security Council briefing in February, and they'll remember just how much of that evidence didn't hold up to tough scrutiny. In France and Mexico and Turkey, they will remember the arm-twisting and bullying and childish caterwauling -- and even if you don't care about those countries, you can bet that Tony Blair will remember just how far he stuck his neck out for an administration that was willing to hang him out to dry, too, and he won't be likely to do it again.

The day this war starts, the world enters a new era of global Darwinism in which a structure of covenants and norms -- admittedly far from perfect, but at least the result of an ongoing dialogue of nations -- that has developed over the last half-century will be pushed aside. It's no contradiction at all to hope for the best for our troops but remain dead set against the rules of world order being rewritten overnight by the jungle's biggest lion."