Workers now are exempt from overtime pay if they earn more than $155 a week, or $8,060 a year, and meet other convoluted, confusing job criteria, such as devoting at least 80 percent of their time to "exercising discretion" and other "intellectual" tasks that cannot be "standardized in ... a given period of time."

The proposal would raise the salary cap to $425 a week, or $22,100 a year, and any worker earning less automatically would be required to receive overtime pay.

Jobs most affected by the changes likely would be assistant managers of stores, restaurants and bars, McCutchen said. They would get overtime pay despite their management status as long as they earn less than $22,100 a year.

This war isn't really about Iraq or deposing Saddam or even eliminating his WMD, though each of those are important benefits along the way. Nor is it something so mundane as a 'war for oil.' The leading architects of this war in and out of the administration see this war, and have pursued it, as an opening blow in a far broader war against political Islam. They see it as the first in a series of wars and near-wars which will lead eventually to the overthrow of most of the current governments in the Middle East, the establishment of western-oriented democracies throughout the Arab world, and the destruction of nothing less than the political world of Islamic fundamentalism.

That, as you might say, is a rather tall order. And it would have been very hard for the administration to sell the American people on such a struggle. So it didn't try. It pushed rather to get us into Iraq, knowing that if it went about the process in the right way it would make a further series of wars against Iran, Syria and perhaps lower-level hostilities against Saudi Arabia and Egypt all but inevitable.