Robert L. Pollock asks if any Iraqi money filtered back to American war critics: Saddam’s Useful Idiots.

A year ago John Kerry described the nations that would liberate Iraq as a “coalition of the bribed, the coerced, the bought and the extorted.” It turns out that may be a better description of his own antiwar camp. From Jacques Chirac’s and Vladimir Putin’s political cronies to Tony Blair’s own Labour Party, many of the most vocal opponents of enforcing U.N. resolutions turn out to have been on the take.

Were some of the most vehement and prominent American critics of the war similarly bought and paid for? There’s no hard evidence to support such a conclusion, but it’s a possibility worthy of investigation following the appearance of a politically connected Detroit-area businessman on a recently published list of individuals receiving oil money from Saddam Hussein.

Shakir al-Khafaji’s close ties to Iraqi Baathists and Michigan Democrats are a matter of public record. In late January the al Mada newspaper in Baghdad published his name on a list of 270 individuals, companies, churches and political parties that Iraqi Oil Ministry documents allege benefited from Saddam’s largesse. The Iraqi Governing Council has hired a team of professional auditors to investigate; some of the alleged beneficiaries have already confessed.

This wasn’t the first time I’d heard Mr. al-Khafaji mentioned in connection with clandestine oil profits. In Baghdad last May, a man I’ll call Omar, a newly unemployed officer of the Iraqi intelligence service (the Mukhabarat), leveled the same accusation. He also alleged that some of the money had been intended to finance a documentary film by former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter and to influence Democratic congressmen, including former House Minority Whip David Bonior.

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