WATCHING MCDERMOTT AND BONIOR FROM ABROAD, Austin Bay reports that he wasn’t impressed — and that their behavior may well have made a war more likely:

I still believe the United States hopes to remove Saddam via the 9mm ballot — a coup d’etat triggered by intense diplomatic and military pressure. Sources here in London indicate Mauretania and North Korea might offer Saddam asylum. Exile isn’t execution (his deserved fate), but it avoids expanded war. Like other psychological gambits, dangling exile could exert pressure within Saddam’s regime. The true soft underbelly of every dictatorship is internal rebellion. . . .

Then there’s the war Reps. Jim McDermott and David Bonior are waging, at the moment via embarrassing phone calls from Baghdad.

These men epitomize that slice of my generation trapped in a terrible quagmire. “Peaceniks” like McDermott and Bonior are still fighting the Vietnam War, and they are sadly indicative of how peaceniks have morphed into appeaseniks. Instead of principled Eugene McCarthy’s opposing LBJ’s War of Body Counts, they’ve become Neville Chamberlains — men who fail to comprehend radically changed circumstances.

Indeed.