Robert L. Borosage

About the Author: Robert L. Borosage is a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a foreign and public policy research institute based in Washington, D.C.

"Thank you, Saddam Hussein."

The people in the Grand Milwaukee Hotel who laugh and applaud the chair's opening words aren't a gang of fanatics lusting for jihad against the infidel. They are the well-creased agents of 247 Wisconsin companies doing business at a September 1990 Defense Contracting Workshop set up by the House Armed Services Committee chairman, Les Aspin, to bring Pentagon money to the Dairy State. Hussein has turned what might have been a wake into a festive orgy of deal making.

Across town, in the Northlawn housing complex, sixty-five-year-old Ronnie Land doesn't share in the gratitude for Hussein. Her son...