It was brought to my attention recently that Reps. De Fazio and and Hinchey offered an amendment to the 2007 Pentagon appropriations bill that would have specifically barred the administration from launching a military attack on Iran without congressional authorization. 158 members of the House voted for it, but 262 voted against and it failed. In other words, a majority of the House seems to have gone on record in favor of letting the president start wars illegally, a fairly discouraging development.

I was reading Michael O’Hanlon’s policy paper on the scary question of what to do if a nuclear-armed regime collapses, and I was struck by this aside: “Pentagon planners have estimated the U.S. forces needed for the defense and ultimate liberation of the ROK to be roughly six ground combat divisions, including Marine and Army units, ten Air Force aircraft wings, and four to five Navy aircraft carrier battle groups – altogether totaling at least half a million Americans under arms.”

How can that possibly be right? South Korea has twice the population of the DPRK and is far richer. In principle, the ROK ought to be able to defend itself adequately without any outside assistance. An American defense commitment to South Korea makes good sense (we get some influence in the region and it motivates South Korea to help us out with other stuff) even though I think they could get along without us, but there’s just no way such an enormous quantity of assistance should be necessary especially because it would, in practice, take an unduly long time to move that much stuff to Korea in the event of a crisis. Meanwhile, South Korea has a $21 billion defense budget to North Korea’s $5 billion and we’re talking about helping the ROK with a defensive operation.

Something doesn’t add up.

Spencer Ackerman notes that we now have confirmation that the invasion of Iraq was intended as the overture in a broader regional war, including one aimed at prompting regime change in Teheran. It’s worth noting that this isn’t just something to file away in the “wacky pre-war predictions” file, but led directly to the administration massively screwing the pooch on several fronts.

First, in Iraq. Whatever it is you’re trying to do with Iraq policy, it’s always going to be easier to accomplish it if the countries surrounding Iraq — including Iran and Syria — are helping you rather than trying to undermine you. Iran and Syria are not, however, run by blithering morons. Thus, when you hint in your public and private statements that one of your ultimate aims in Iraq is to overthrow the governments of Iran and Syria you wind up pushing them heavily into the “undermine” camp and essentially making it impossible to accomplish anything.

Second, in Iran. As we now know, soon after the invasion of Iraq, Iran tried to open talks aimed at a broad US-Iranian diplomatic settlement. On the table would be Iran ending its nuclear program and curtailing its support for Palestinian rejectionists, in exchange for the United States lifting sanctions disavowing a regime change policy, and trying to accommodate Iranian interests in Iraq and Afghanistan. That would have been a very good deal for the USA to take, as anyone with a functioning brain to see. Unfortunately, though, functioning brains were in short supply inside the administration which believed that the Iranian domino was about to fall so there was no need to talk settlement.

Thus we have a major cause of our current mess in Iraq and of our current mess vis-a-vis Iran all wrapped up in one neat package.