Preston Bryant is a Republican who has represented Lynchburg and part of Amherst County in the Virginia House of Delgates since 1996.

The former president and the current congressman from Virginia's third district each have done their bit to give Saddam Hussein some solace as U.S. troops do battle in Iraq.

Carter, our former commander-in-chief, took the world-stage opportunity afforded him in early December by the Nobel Committee to take a swipe at President Bush. During Carter's Nobel Lecture in Oslo that followed his receiving that increasingly political organization's Peace Prize, he noted that war, though sometimes necessary, "is always an evil, never a good."

While few will disagree with Carter's statement, it was heard around the world as a rebuke to Bush, our current commander-in-chief, as Bush was beginning to assemble a mighty military coalition to force Saddam's hand toward surrender. The media played and replayed Carter's words, with the more liberal of them wasting no opportunity to offer them up as evidence of discord in American foreign policy.

Former presidents should not - under any circumstances - undercut an incumbent president's position in the world. Domestic politics is where we hash out differences; foreign policy - especially when war is brewing - is where we demonstrate unity.

But Carter didn't stop there. In early March, just a week before Bush's March 17th deadline for Saddam to disarm, Carter wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times decrying our move toward what he described as an "unjust war." He also undercut Bush in the piece by accusing the president of acting against basic religious tenets and showing disrespect for international law.

Again, Carter went out of his way to weaken our president in the eyes of the world. Carter's actions have not simply been ill timed - they've been unconscionable.

So who could possibly rival Carter's stupidity?

Well, enter Bobby Scott, the Democratic congressman from Newport News, an area home to thousands of active and retired military personnel.

When a House resolution was offered this past week to express "unequivocal support" for Bush and our hundreds of thousands of troops on the battlefields of Iraq, Scott was one of only 11 congressmen - and the only Virginian, of course - to vote against it.

That's right, Scott voted against the successful resolution showing support for our president and our troops.

His reasons? He didn't think Saddam was an "imminent threat" and he also didn't think the resolution should've shown so much praise for Bush.

Huh? Maybe Scott should argue the "imminent threat" point with the survivors - what few there are - of the tens of thousands of Kurds who were gassed by Saddam. And perhaps Scott would like to argue with the thousands of red-blooded retired and active military personnel in his district that we should show only passive, tepid support to our commander-in-chief in a time of war.

Who among us dares think that Carter's words and Scott's vote didn't bring a smile to Saddam's face?

Who thinks that such sown seeds of public discord do anything other than make more difficult the jobs of both our nation's diplomats and military planners?

Who thinks that our troops' faces aren't sore from the slaps these two public figures have given them?

Nobody will ever really hold up Carter as a top-notch foreign policy thinker. As president, he was as much a disaster there as in crafting domestic policy. And nobody will ever again - that is, if anyone ever did at all - think of Scott as a go-to guy when the tough gets going.

So what is it that Carter and Scott can do now to make up for the damage they've done?

Carter can just slink back to his peanut farm in Plains - and be quiet until the war is over. Scott can apologize - and then resign.