'Baghdad Jim' strikes again

The news Wednesday that Saddam Hussein secretly financed a 2002 “fact-finding” junket to Iraq by three Democratic members of Congress left the lawmakers scrambling to deny they knew anything about Iraqi intelligence officials paying for the trip. “Obviously, we didn’t know it at the time,” said Michael DeCesare, a spokesman for Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington, and the Justice Department agrees there’s no evidence they knew.

But now they’re trying to rewrite history about the trip, and somebody ought to call them on it. “The trip was to see the plight of the Iraqi children,” DeCesare said. “That’s the only reason we went.” That’s simply not true. It was clearly a partisan propaganda stunt meant to undermine President Bush, who was at the time pushing for a resolution to authorize military force while trying to pressure Saddam to open up to U.N. weapons inspections. Meanwhile, remember, Iraq was firing on U.S. and British planes in the U.N. no-fly zone.

Before even leaving on the trip, McDermott stood in front of the Capitol, on national TV, and said Bush “will lie to the American people in order to get us into this war.” On camera in Baghdad, McDermott appeared on ABC and said that while “the president would mislead the American people, … you have to take the Iraqis at their face value.” Rep. David Bonior of Michigan chimed in with similar drivel about how honorable Saddam was compared to Bush, but the third member of the group, Rep. Mike Thompson of California, kept a low profile. Columnist George Will called McDermott's comments “the most disgraceful performance abroad by an American official in my lifetime.”

Many will say in retrospect that McDermott and Bonior were right, that “Bush lied,” even though the flawed intelligence at the time made “liars” out of nearly every elected official, Republican and Democratic, who spoke out on Iraq. But the larger point is this: The supposedly “anti-war” mission, which in previous eras would have been considered borderline treason, may actually have helped to create the conditions that led to the U.S. invasion the next year.

The House trio’s show of solidarity with Saddam had to have helped give the Iraqi leader, who it turns out was not all that savvy about U.S. politics anyway, a faulty impression of the situation in Washington and of the prospects for military action. With such support for his position among some elected officials, surely the U.S. would lack the will for "regime change." Perhaps Saddam dug in his heels and refused inspections, “knowing” we’d never invade. So when Will called the House members “useful idiots,” he was at least half-right.

Sen. John McCain, who wasn’t exactly a fan of Bush at the time, put it this way: “If Congressman McDermott and Congressman Bonior want to go to the floor of the House and question the president’s credibility, go right ahead and do it. Don’t go to Baghdad and do it. You are helping the Iraqi government sell to the Iraqi people their hatred of the United States of America, and it’s wrong and I honestly do not understand it. These are supposed to be grown, mature individuals.”

In the end, it really doesn’t matter who paid for trip. What matters is that McDermott & Co. got their 30 pieces of air-time silver.