April 9, 2007 - Dick Cheney has a problem. He owed his rise to the upper levels of national government from the obscurity of Wyoming to one man, Donald Rumsfeld. He owed his position at the head of Halliburton to his prominence in G.H.W. Bush administration. The revolving door he used to enter the highest level of the corporate world revolved again and he seized the opportunity to make himself the Republican Vice -Presidential Candidate in the election of 2000. Again, as he had in the earlier days, he was allied with Donald Rumsfeld. Both of them were committed to the agenda pushed by the neo-conservative Project for the New American Century. PNAC sought to establish a new American hegemony – nothing less than an American Empire controlling the world’s economy through its energy supply. The keystone of the agenda was to control the supply of oil and specifically to use American military power to grab first Iraq and then Iran. In the Secretary of Defense he had the perfect ally in his effort to bend the facts to fit the PNAC agenda. Cheney would declare that Saddam Hussein was at the center of the 9-11 plot and Rumsfeld’s Pentagon would provide the “intelligence” to back him up. Cheney would declare that Saddam was just a step away from having an atomic bomb and Rumsfeld’s intelligence shop would provide the mushroom cloud.

Well, now things have changed but Dick Cheney hasn’t. He is still warning us about Iraqi villains. As late this week on the Rush Limbaugh radio fantasy rant the Vice President repeated the same al Qaeda-Iraq fiction he was peddling five years ago. There is a difference though. Five years ago Cheney would lie and Rumsfeld would swear to it. His most outrageous declarations were followed by a Pentagon amen. Today there is a new Secretary of State and apparently one to whom truth is more important than truthiness. While the Vice-President was on the Rush show begging us to beware of al Qaeda the Defense Department released its report declaring that previous declarations of a link between 9-11 and Saddam’s Iraq were distorted and that no such relationship had existed. With every new revelation squeezed out in the face of an hostile Congress the neo-con line becomes less and less credible – less and less credible that is to everyone but the neo-con faithful and the dittoheads. For them the only reality is that which their agenda demands that reality be.

In this case one would think that the Vice President and his supporters would be embarrassed by the juxtaposition of his broadcast claims and the contradictory Pentagon report released contemporaneously. That he and his rabid partisans are not in the least nonplussed demonstrates the extent to which they are removed from any vestige of reality. The neo-con reaction is symptomatic of their belief that reality is that which they wish it to be. They have ignited a boomlet urging Dick Cheney to reconsider and run for President. Next we can expect a Draft Cheney movement to which he can reluctantly acquiesce. That is Dick’s problem.

Our problem is that so long as Dick Cheney and George Bush are in a position to define reality as they wish the war in Iraq will go on and on. So long as neo-con doctrine is permitted to override any intelligent assessment of facts the War in Afghanistan – the central battlefield in the War on Terror – will continue to be neglected. So long as they call the shots the only sure path leads to a continued erosion of America’s hard earned position and the establishment of a Shiite hegemony in the Persian Gulf and a continued terrorist regime in the territory where King of the Khyber Rifles lost the fight. That is our problem with Dick.