Jim McDermott is a museum-quality specimen of the American foreign policy leftist. It's no big surprise that he was conned into accepting a Saddam-financed propaganda trip to Baghdad back in 2002.

McDermott was right – but only by accident – when he declared that Iraq then was harboring no weapons of mass destruction. Why? Because Saddam's regime said so. Its declarations had to be taken "at face value," McDermott said.

It was a self-destructing claim, however true. Russian intelligence (which got the WMD story right) would have been a far more credible source.

McDermott was roundly criticized at the time for lending his prestige to Saddam by spouting off in Baghdad rather than on Capitol Hill. Presumably, Iraqi intelligence got its money's worth.

But the real problem was the contradiction in his purposes. McDermott wanted to stop a war that – give him credit – later turned into a disaster. But on the same trip, he was also trying to undo the international sanctions that were keeping Saddam from getting unhindered access to the revenues from Iraq's oil wealth.

The unraveling of those sanctions – especially by Russia and France – were precisely what had many Americans alarmed enough to support the original decision to invade Iraq.

After the invasion, a top-to-bottom search for Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" led by Charles Duelfer famously came up empty. But read the fine print. While inflicting one of the greatest embarrassments in U.S. history on the Bush administration, Duelfer also concluded that Saddam intended to get his nuclear and chemical weapons programs back up and running once the sanctions were lifted.

In the real-world political context of 2002, fighting the sanctions amounted to inviting the war. McDermott and many others wanted it both ways: No war – and no fetters on Saddam Hussein. That took more obtuseness than accepting a junket on Saddam's dime.