George Will rips into Baghdad Bozos Jim McDermott and David Bonior.

Bonior, until recently second-ranking in the House Democratic leadership, said sources no less reliable than Hussein’s minions told them that inspectors would have an “unrestricted ability to go where they want.” McDermott said: “I think you have to take the Iraqis on their value — at their face value.” And: “I think the president would mislead the American people.”

McDermott and Bonior are two specimens of what Lenin, referring to Westerners who denied the existence of Lenin’s police-state terror, called “useful idiots.” Perhaps Iraqi officials, knowing fathomless gullibility when they see it — they have dealt with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan — actually said such things. Or perhaps McDermott and Bonior heard what they wished to hear. …

Bonior’s contribution from Baghdad was to charge that “a horrendous, barbaric, horrific” number of cases of childhood leukemia and lymphomas have been caused by “uranium that has been part of our weapons system that was dropped here during the last war.” These weapons “are coated with uranium that atomize and cause these serious health problems.”

This familiar accusation, which struck Bonior as new, concerns the use of depleted uranium as a heavy metal (also used in the armor plating of U.S. tanks) to increase the armor-penetrating ability of anti-tank munitions. The radiation involved is much less than that occurring naturally in the Iraqi soil where tank battles occurred in 1991. At least a dozen U.S., U.N. and European studies, including one involving U.S. soldiers who still have depleted uranium in their bodies resulting from “friendly fire” accidents, show no grounds for believing in the health effects Baghdad and Bonior claim.