Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman today, Mr. Herbert on Barack Obama and the lunacy of the current war, then Mr. Krugman on the lunacy of considering war with Iran. First up, Mr. Herbert:

Almost all the talk about the 2008 presidential election is about the horse race: Who’s up? Who’s down? Can Hillary hold her lead? Can a pro-choice, pro-gay-rights candidate like Rudy Giuliani outrun a hawkish maverick like John McCain?

It’s a sport. It’s fun. Why spoil it by being too serious?

Senator Barack Obama, in his speech in Illinois Saturday formally launching his presidential bid, gave us an excellent reason for being serious:

Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a war on.

After going through a litany of lofty goals for a new generation to strive for, including health care for all Americans, a rejuvenated public education system, an end to poverty and real progress in dealing with global warming, the senator offered a hard and simple truth:

“All of this cannot come to pass until we bring an end to this war in Iraq.”

The war — which, in addition to its human toll, will ultimately cost $2 trillion or more — has put America in a straitjacket, precluding progress on a range of important issues that will only worsen with continued neglect.

The public seems to understand this. It was voters fed up with the war who snatched control of both houses of Congress from the Republicans in last November’s elections. And they were the ones giving Senator Hillary Clinton a hard time in New Hampshire over the weekend.

While Senator Obama is pushing a plan to bring American combat troops home by March 2008 (and former Senator John Edwards is calling for an immediate withdrawal), Senator Clinton continues to dance on the war issue. “I know that there is a great deal of frustration and anger and outrage,” she said on Saturday, “but we can’t just wave a magic wand and make things change.”

We’ve moved beyond the absurd when it comes to the war. President Bush responded to the antiwar sentiment in last November’s election by escalating U.S. involvement in Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney, lost in a zone of unreality, is blithely spreading the fantasy of “enormous progress.” He may not have noticed that the last three months have been among the worst of the war.

The Democrats who benefited from the antiwar vote reacted to the president’s thumb in the eye of the voters with their usual timidity. They’ve put their hearts and souls into a marathon effort to pass a nonbinding resolution opposing the troop surge. Be still my heart.

The bottom line is that nothing has changed. The horror stories continue to spew out of Iraq: the helicopters being shot down, the mass killings in marketplaces, the steady stream of U.S. soldiers returning in body bags.

We need to stop pretending that there is something sane about continued U.S. involvement in this ruinous war. We keep sending troops into the combat zone and they keep sinking ever deeper into the ancient Middle East sand. To keep sending young people off to die in a war that everybody knows is pointless is criminal.

On NBC’s “Nightly News” last Friday the correspondent Richard Engel, traveling with a convoy of soldiers from the First Infantry Division, had a close call when a roadside bomb detonated several feet away. No one was hurt, and Staff Sgt. Chris Copley said into the camera, with a laugh and a hint of bravado, “It gets the adrenaline going a little bit, doesn’t it?”

But Mr. Engel noted that when the convoy returned to its patrol base, Sergeant Copley and other soldiers were openly wondering, “What are they doing out here?”

It’s a question that deserves a clear, straight answer, especially from their commander in chief and the politicians running for president. As the casualties mount and success seems more and more unlikely, a sense of resignation is spreading among U.S. troops.

Sergeant Copley told Mr. Engel: “It’s pretty much almost a lost cause. Nothing it seems that we do is doing any good.”

Mr. Engel said all of the soldiers he talked with believed it was “time to end this war.” He closed his piece by telling Brian Williams, “Earlier in the week some of the soldiers I was embedded with were hit by a larger I.E.D. That I.E.D. tore the door off the Humvee and the soldier inside had to have both of his legs amputated.”

Senator Obama’s capacity for leadership will be tested in large part by whether he can get the country to rally around his crucial point — that all further progress on important issues here at home depends on whether we can find the will to extricate ourselves from Iraq.

And now here’s Paul Krugman:

Attacking Iran would be a catastrophic mistake, even if all the allegations now being made about Iranian actions in Iraq are true.

But it wouldn’t be the first catastrophic mistake this administration has made, and there are indications that, at the very least, a powerful faction in the administration is spoiling for a fight.

Before we get to the apparent war-mongering, let’s talk about the basics. Are there people in Iran providing aid to factions in Iraq, factions that sometimes kill Americans as well as other Iraqis? Yes, probably. But you can say the same about Saudi Arabia, which is believed to be a major source of financial support for Sunni insurgents — and Sunnis, not Iranian-backed Shiites, are still responsible for most American combat deaths.

The Bush administration, however, with its close personal and financial ties to the Saudis, has always downplayed Saudi connections to America’s enemies. Iran, on the other hand, which had no connection to 9/11, and was actually quite helpful to the United States in the months after the terrorist attack, somehow found itself linked with its bitter enemy Saddam Hussein as part of the “axis of evil.”

So the administration has always had it in for the Iranian regime. Now, let’s do an O. J. Simpson: if you were determined to start a war with Iran, how would you do it?

First, you’d set up a special intelligence unit to cook up rationales for war. A good model would be the Pentagon’s now-infamous Office of Special Plans, led by Abram Shulsky, that helped sell the Iraq war with false claims about links to Al Qaeda.

Sure enough, last year Donald Rumsfeld set up a new “Iranian directorate” inside the Pentagon’s policy shop. And last September Warren Strobel and John Walcott of McClatchy Newspapers — who were among the few journalists to warn that the administration was hyping evidence on Iraqi W.M.D. — reported that “current and former officials said the Pentagon’s Iranian directorate has been headed by Abram Shulsky.”

Next, you’d go for a repeat of the highly successful strategy by which scare stories about the Iraqi threat were disseminated to the public.

This time, however, the assertions wouldn’t be about W.M.D.; they’d be that Iranian actions are endangering U.S. forces in Iraq. Why? Because there’s no way Congress will approve another war resolution. But if you can claim that Iran is doing evil in Iraq, you can assert that you don’t need authorization to attack — that Congress has already empowered the administration to do whatever is necessary to stabilize Iraq. And by the time the lawyers are finished arguing — well, the war would be in full swing.

Finally, you’d build up forces in the area, both to prepare for the strike and, if necessary, to provoke a casus belli. There’s precedent for the idea of provocation: in a January 2003 meeting with Prime Minster Tony Blair, The New York Times reported last year, President Bush “talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire.”

In the end, Mr. Bush decided that he didn’t need a confrontation to start that particular war. But war with Iran is a harder sell, so sending several aircraft carrier groups into the narrow waters of the Persian Gulf, where a Gulf of Tonkin-type incident could all too easily happen, might be just the thing.

O.K., I hope I’m worrying too much. Those carrier groups could be going to the Persian Gulf just as a warning.

But you have to wonder about the other stuff. Why would the Pentagon put someone who got everything wrong on Iraq in charge of intelligence on Iran? Why wasn’t any official willing to take personal responsibility for the reliability of alleged evidence of Iranian mischief, as opposed to being an anonymous source? If the evidence is solid enough to bear close scrutiny, why were all cameras and recording devices, including cellphones, banned from yesterday’s Baghdad briefing?

It’s still hard to believe that they’re really planning to attack Iran, when it’s so obvious that another war would be a recipe for even bigger disaster. But remember who’s calling the shots: Dick Cheney thinks we’ve had “enormous successes” in Iraq.