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Dick Cheney is the most powerful vice president of modern times -- more powerful than the seasoned Gore under the callow Clinton or the experienced Poppa Bush under the inexperienced Reagan. Cheney, in fact, is sometimes referred to as George W. Bush's brain or, to be even more mocking, his ventriloquist. It would be fitting, then, for this most powerful of all vice presidents to be the first in American history to be censured. He has it coming.
It won't happen, of course. But Cheney ought to be made to account for his repeated exaggerations of the Iraqi threat. I am referring specifically to his dire warning that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was working on a menacing nuclear weapons program and the United States had to do something about it. We know now that such a program did not exist.
We know it because it cannot be found. We know it because it is impossible to hide such a program because, among other things, traces of it can be detected in the air and in the water. We know it because the experts -- Americans and others -- have now said so. They have told my Washington Post colleague Barton Gellman that Iraq, in his words, had "no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology . . . needed for either." That, inconveniently, is what U.N. weapons inspectors maintained all along.
But those inspectors were not only dismissed by Cheney as Hussein's useful idiots, they were actually bullied by him. Former assistant secretary of state James P. Rubin wrote in Foreign Affairs that when Cheney met with Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, the two most prominent U.N. inspectors, he bluntly told them that if the Bush administration found fault with their judgment, "we will not hesitate to discredit you." It now appears that it's Cheney who's been discredited.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26880-2003Oct27.html
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