Not So Innocents Abroad
Not So Innocents Abroad In last week's episode, much of respectable Washington was aghast that the Bush White House had "politicized" the possibility of war by questioning the patriotism of...
...McDermott, again: "We've gone and looked at diarrhea clinics, we've looked at hospitals taking care of kids who have cancer and so forth, and we've looked at water filtration plants...
...Just before the credits rolled, however, a potentially clarifying development unexpectedly appeared in the script: Three Democratic House members took off on a "fact-finding" trip to Baghdad and Basra, where two of them, David Bonior of Michigan and Jim McDermott of Washington, at a series of site visits helpfully arranged by Iraqi functionaries, repeatedly and vigorously endorsed even the grossest falsehoods of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party propaganda...
...Not So Innocents Abroad In last week's episode, much of respectable Washington was aghast that the Bush White House had "politicized" the possibility of war by questioning the patriotism of congressional Democrats who opposed the president's Iraq policy...
...By contrast, Saddam Hussein would not mislead the American people...
...And no such inquiry has ever produced a speck of evidence to substantiate the charges David Bonior would like to resuscitate on behalf of "the children" in Iraq...
...Isn't it true, though, that the Iraqis are insisting that international observers be barred from more than 1,000 government installations, on 12 square miles of total property...
...Dissent which must be voiced or "it's not a democracy" anymore...
...Bonior and McDermott, presumably...
...The White House, widely assumed to be on watch for any hint of Democratic resistance to war with Iraq, and eager to use it as partisan ammunition in the coming midterm elections, has largely declined to comment on, much less criticize, either man...
...Where war is concerned, Ramadan promised, "wwe'll decide when it happens...
...In defense of these unusually stupid remarks, McDer-mott cites Lyndon Johnson's Tonkin Gulf resolution—and claims to have earned from that experience a special entitlement to disbelieve any such presidentially asserted casus belli: "Both David [Bonior] and I were in that war...
...McDermott: "I mean, after the 7th of December, 1941, that wasn't any question...
...I wouldn't support military action in this endeavor at all...
...Each man wore his nation's uniform during the late 1960s, McDermott as a psychiatrist at Long Beach Naval Station and Bonior as an Air Force cook stationed elsewhere in the Los Angeles metropolitan area...
...The world community already knows about "it," actually...
...Come to think of it, they've gotten off relatively easy here at home, too, bad reviews from the talk shows and people like McCain to the contrary notwithstanding...
...Bonior: "They don't want to be having knocks on the door during prayer...
...Their trip was an outrageous breach of official responsibility...
...And the European Commission...
...But this time the honorable gentleman has clearly outdone himself...
...After all, no more prominent man has any more forcefully complained about Bonior and McDer-mott's adventures in Baghdad than Sen...
...Bonior and McDermott do not deserve the dignity of presidential notice...
...We have done a "horrendous, a barbaric, horrific thing," Bonior said, and "the world community needs to know about it...
...explosive shells hardened by low-radiation "depleted uranium" have widely poisoned Persian Gulf War battlefields...
...Could it be that such a "reason" has been hidden from the congressmen's view...
...In Basra, he and Bonior as much as charged the United States with war crimes in connection with the first, 1991 invasion of Iraq...
...Any American, British, or Zionist interests on Arab land or within reach of Arabs, wherever they are, I consider as legitimate...
...no one can fairly say that the Democratic party has apologized for Saddam Hussein...
...At least 13 Western governments have sent scientific teams to analyze the environmental health effects of depleted-uranium munitions employed in wartime...
...We have had complete access to anything we want here, and they have not kept us from anything we asked to do...
...Even as McDermott and Bonior were still on the ground in Baghdad, issuing their all's well cry, Iraqi vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan was telling the world, by way of Lebanese television, that his government reserved the right to launch a preemptive first strike—against American and allied targets, military or civilian, anywhere in the world...
...Neither, for that matter, had any serious Democratic dissent emerged to begin with...
...If it turns out Iraq maintains a weapons of mass destruction program, would a U.S.-led preemptive assault be justified then...
...Bonior and McDermott, with such a rich, steaming stew of fresh and relevant material, surely both the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership would find reason, and feel eager, to settle their still echoing controversy over war politics and patriotism...
...And the British Royal Society...
...McDermott, a 14-year veteran of the House, has long been known on Capitol Hill for below-average intelligence and an addiction to intemperate speech...
...Oh, sure, a number of congressional Republicans—and innumerable spokespundits for the Party of Journalism—have pronounced on the thing...
...And the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill, as recently as two weeks ago ferociously indignant over any suggestion that home-team spirit against the Iraqi regime might be lacking in its ranks, has uttered nary a peep about Bonior and McDermott—who say the home team is guilty of infanticide, among other things...
...Asked by reporters about Saddam's suspected pursuit of an atomic bomb, Bonior replied that "the only nuclear piece that we've been able to detect here . . . is an incredible, unconscionable increase in leukemias and lymphomas for children that have been affected by this, the uranium that has been part of our weapons system that was dropped here...
...Rejection of a distinctly partisan cast...
...But it is not at all true that denunciations of their recent visit to Iraq are principally grounded in ignorance about the horrors of combat...
...Bonior, again: "No...
...On the eve of his mission to Baghdad, McDermott was heard to suggest that President Bush would probably lie to us in order to justify another attack on Iraq...
...Presented, courtesy of Reps...
...David Bonior and Jim McDermott are freaks...
...Those are mosques, explains Mr...
...Most of which commentary has focused, understandably, on some peculiar advice McDermott has offered about whom Americans can confidently trust in a dispute between George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...Iraq "has the right to confront the aggressors on its land and in any place the aggressors are found...
...Mike Thompson of California was largely silent throughout the trip and now plainly wishes he'd stayed home altogether) violated a fundamental protocol of American government...
...In other words, the Bonior-McDermott delegation (Rep...
...hardly constitutes a muscular and forthright argument against the use of U.S...
...To wit: Elected federal officials traveling abroad, especially when they are guests of an officially designated terrorist state, are not supposed to attack, and thereby undermine, the national security policies of the United States...
...But the Democratic party makes a mistake, and does itself a disservice, by continued reluctance publicly to discipline these, its very wayward lambs...
...And rejection so extreme in manner and substance as to challenge the ordinary connotative boundaries of the term "loyal opposition...
...And their party, it seems to us, should say so...
...As should their undisputed "American right" to play Ezra Pound to Saddam Hussein's Benito Mussolini...
...On behalf of the grownups now running the government of Iraq, Bonior and McDermott have offered some startlingly aggressive character witness...
...Outrageous, in fact, to an extent only fractionally reflected in the random chatter it has so far occasioned...
...Not so his critics, McDermott contends: "Many people who talk about war have never seen it, they've never participated in it"—and they therefore fail to appreciate the battle-tested authority with which he exercises an "American right" to dissent from Bush administration policy...
...There was a clear reason [for war...
...It is true, sort of, that McDermott and his friend "were in that war...
...What is the clear reason here...
...They do not speak for their party...
...First off, war is an intrinsically and legitimately political issue, partisan debate about which is nothing to be aghast over...
...And after he arrived in Baghdad, pressed on this point during a satellite interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, McDermott refused to budge: "I think the president would mislead the American people...
...I think," said McDermott, again using that word very loosely, that "you have to take the Iraqis on their face value" when they promise, for the umpteenth time, finally to cooperate with an effective United Nations weapons-inspection program...
...And while it would indeed have been beyond the pale for the president and his men to smear Democratic dissent as per se disloyal, no such smear had actually been forthcoming...
...And if they turn out not to be mosques...
...Granted, arriving at a coherent position, yea or nay, on the president's Iraq policy has proved a tricky political problem for Democrats, one they have notably failed to solve...
...What about our domestic economy...
...But nervous bewilderment does not constitute disloyalty...
...military force overseas...
...Ramadan's threat does not apply to Reps...
...And the World Health Organization...
...Still, confusion reigned and little plot twists like these went unresolved...
...McDermott calling President Bush a liar on a television hookup from Baghdad was the least of it, really...
...Respectable Washington was mistaken about all this...
...No, it hasn't happened...
...John McCain, who, though he was nothing so exalted as a cook or a psychiatrist during the Vietnam War, nevertheless seems adequately qualified to call it "reprehensible" that two members of the House would dare "give comfort to the enemy...
...In any case, Bonior and McDermott's status as veterans should be quite beside the point...
...So has the U.N...
...At any point during their tour, did the congressmen see signs that Saddam Hussein might pose an imminent threat to America and its people...
...Here at last we had, whatever else might be said about it, a genuine, unqualified rejection of renewed war in the Persian Gulf...
...The Bush administration makes a wise choice to remain silent here, we think...
...Bonior's (approving) reference was to Iraqi allegations that trace residues from U.S...
...An enemy is an enemy...
Vol. 8 • October 2002 • No. 5
