Onward, ever onward. The quick and relatively painless victory we're all hoping for may have some truly ugly consequences, as the Boston Globe's Peter Canellos reports this morning. Canellos quotes Harvard foreign-policy expert Stanley Hoffman:

This is a very important moment, but not a reassuring one. If there is agreement in the administration on a wider plan, I think it's so wide as to be utopian.

I think after Iraq there'll be disagreement among the people who agreed on Iraq. Some will want to go into North Korea. Some will want to go into Iran ... but I'm not sure they have a game plan beyond Iraq.

On Tuesday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recalled what "a British official close to the Bush team" told Newsweek last August: "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran."

Nuke-bearing North Korea obviously needs to be dealt with -- preferably through the kind of one-on-one negotiations the White House has refused to engage in, as New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Bill Clinton's UN ambassador, called for during an appearance on The O'Reilly Factor on Tuesday.

But the vision of war without end that some White House advisers seem to entertain is horrifying beyond belief.