President Bush had been beating up Congress for weeks for not passing the defense spending bill when Congress finally did — and he vetoed it.

He issued a statement of disapproval, better known as a pocket veto, which means the bill dies Monday night because he won’t sign it.

Mr. Bush did it because a provision in the bill would expand the right of Americans to seek financial compensation from countries that support terrorism. He said damage suits against Iraq could destabilize the government. (It’s already unstable, but I assume he meant more so.)

The veto holds up, among other things, a pay raise for military personnel, including thousands in Hawaii, that was to have started Tuesday.

“Only George Bush could be for supporting the troops before he was against it,” said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who lost the last presidential election after the president said Kerry was for the Iraq war before he was against it. Turnabout is always amusing, but let’s press on.

Back to the reason for the veto. The bit in question would make it easier for Americans who lost family members to terrorism — not just in the Iraq war but in the Pan Am bombing or the Marine barracks bombing of 1983, to sue Iraq or Syria or Libya or whatever nation they felt was culpable in their loved one’s death.

That may theoretically be a concern for Syria or Libya, but the pressing concern for Mr. Bush is that for Iraq this is no theoretical issue — U.S. POWs in the 1990s Gulf War actually won a $959 million judgment against Iraq. The U.S. government has since said the new government of Iraq cannot be held responsible for claims against the Saddam Hussein regime — which the United State first propped up and then toppled as Saddam began to display more malice than malleability. (This shocked — shocked! — the U.S. government, despite the fact that Saddam was a professional assassin before he entered politics. I am not making this up.)

You may think, “So what? It’s not like the current government of Iraq would actually pay the money, so this is a moot point.”

The reason it is not a moot point is that Iraq keeps an ocean of oil profits, at least $20 billion but probably loads more, in banks that the U.S. courts can get to with orders to freeze assets. The Iraqi government will not willingly pay hundreds of millions of dollars to wronged individuals or their families, but the courts might simply take it. And Iraq needs its Gringott-sized coffers to build a power plant or make a payroll or something.

O.K., fine, but why didn’t President Bush bring this up about eight radio addresses ago?

THAT’S the non-partisan point I wanted to call your attention to.

According to the Sunday edition of the New York Times, the potential fallout from the measure never occurred to anybody on Capitol Hill or at the White House. It was someone in Baghdad who figured it out.

A couple of guys from the Iraqi government called in U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and apparently said something along the lines of, “What are you trying to do to us here? Do you guys even read your own bills?”

Of course not! They’re thousands of pages long and boring as hell.

But Crocker sent a rocket to Washington, D.C., suggesting that maybe some legal eagle might want to actually read the provision and look into this. Someone did, and told his betters at the White House something along the lines of, “We have a problem here.”

The Times described a conference call with reporters in which a White House spokesman said it was less than two weeks ago that the matter came into “acute focus.”

That is Washingtonspeak for, “We had no clue, but that was then, this is now.”

Don’t be surprised by this. And don’t attribute it to incompetency by the Bush administration — or, to put it more carefully, don’t attribute it to incompetency SOLELY by the Bush administration. This has been going on for years, in administrations of all political stripes, no matter which party controls Congress.

Legal and budgetary matters at the federal level have grown so unimaginably complex that nobody understands it all. There are unintended consequences all the time from stuff that gets done without the understanding of Congress or the president. Sometimes it’s something slipped in by a senator, sometimes it’s a line item in the president’s own budget submission, but either way chaos theory is in play, because of the sheer complexity of the legislation that gets passed.

It’s a situation that will make more trouble until it comes into acute focus.