NICE HITCHENS COLUMN in the Washington Post:

Some peaceniks clear their throats by saying that, of course, they oppose Saddam Hussein as much as anybody, though not enough to support doing anything about him.

But some don’t even bother to make this disavowal. In the United States, the main organizer of anti-war propaganda is Ramsey Clark, who perhaps understandably can’t forgive himself for having been Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general. However, he fails to live down this early disgrace by acting as a front man for a sinister sect — the International Action Center, cover name for the Workers World Party — which refuses to make any criticism of the Saddam regime. It is this quasi-Stalinist group, co-organized by a man with the wondrous name of Clark Kissinger, which has recruited such figures as Ed Asner and Marisa Tomei to sign the “Not In Our Name” petition. Funny as this may be in some ways (I don’t think the administration is going to war in the name of Ed Asner or Marisa Tomei, let alone Gore Vidal), it is based on a surreptitious political agenda. In Britain, the chief spokesman of the “anti-war” faction is a Labour MP named George Galloway, who is never happier than when writing moist profiles of Saddam and who says that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the worst moment of his life.

For the democratic and libertarian Left, that same moment was a high point and not a low one. But there were three ruling parties in the world that greeted the liberation of Eastern Europe with unreserved gloom. These were the Socialist Party of Serbia, the Ba’ath Party of Iraq and the Workers’ Party of North Korea, guided by their lugubrious yet megalomaniacal leaders.

Who, sadly, can still find useful idiots in the West. Read the whole thing.