| Saddam's Salesmen |
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, March 27, 2008
"If being used means that we're highlighting the suffering of Iraqi children, or any children, then yes, we don't mind being used." – Rep. James McDermott, D-WA, on his 2002 trip to Iraq, financed by Saddam Hussein.
The media revealed last night that Saddam Hussein personally funded the trip of three Democratic Congressmen to Iraq on the eve of the war that led to his ouster. Saddam's Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) reportedly bribed an American Muslim activist with two million barrels of oil to arrange the fall 2002 trip for left-wing Congressmen Jim McDermott, D-WA; David Bonior, D-MI; and Mike Thompson, D-CA.
David Horowitz and I thoroughly chronicled the event in our new book, Party of Defeat. On September 29, 2002, the ignominious trio appeared on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, via satellite hookup from foreign soil, to extol the truthfulness of Saddam Hussein, decry the already weakened sanctions imposed by the United Nations, and call President Bush a liar bent on war. David Bonior – who long served as House Democratic Whip, the second-highest ranking post in the House of Representatives – laid the blame squarely on the United States of America. Bonior denounced the regimen of multilateral sanctions, already weakened by the Oil for Food program, as "barbaric" and "horrific." He backed this up with anecdotal evidence gleaned from the group's well-supervised tour of Iraqi hospitals. Worse, the U.S. had been "trying to push and dictate" Iraq, namely by requiring its dictator verify his compliance with the cease-fire that ended the first Gulf War and the 17 UN resolutions he was currently defying. Although Saddam Hussein had frustrated all previous weapons inspections, Bonior blithely announced that he would now allow inspectors the "unrestricted" autonomy "to look anywhere." (Of course, the inspectors' job was not to play hide-and-seek with Iraq's prewar WMD cache; it was to verify that he had destroyed all WMDs, as he had agreed to do as a precondition of peace in 1991.) Rep. James McDermott echoed that none of the arms imbroglio was the Iraqi regime's fault, anyway, as "Iraq did not drive the inspectors out; we took them out." Again, the United States was blaming the victim and punishing innocent children for her own misdeeds. When pressed about believing the promises of a murderous international pariah, McDermott said, "I think you have to take the Iraqis at their face value," but he offered no such quarter to the commander-in-chief of the U.S. military. "I think the president would mislead the American people," he declared.
On the eve of the war, three sitting U.S. Congressmen treated Saddam Hussein as President Bush's moral superior.
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