The NYT has a long piece today about his supposed loss of influence in the Bush White House.  I don't buy it for a second.  Cheney has always been a master of retreating and staying in the shadows until his public presence is politically valuable once again.  It's one of the reasons he is such an effective debater—no one sees him coming, because even after 6 years in office, no one really knows who he is.

One thing he isn't is someone who should be handling military affairs, as this excerpt from the Times' piece clearly shows:


His prediction in 2002 that overthrowing Mr. Hussein would force radical extremists “to rethink their strategy of jihad” proved wrong, as Mr. Bush implicitly acknowledged last week when he described how the array of enemies facing America has multiplied.  Mr. Cheney’s friends and former aides said they were mystified about how the same man who as defense secretary in 1991 warned that “for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire” managed, 15 years later, to find himself facing that prospect.


How Mr. Cheney thought overthrowing a secular, state-driven geopolitical actor who despised the jihadist movement would be some kind of blow against "radical jihadists" is beyond me.  But that is the central problem behind the Bush/Cheney Administration's entire approach to fighting the war on terror.  They are utterly fixated on states, ignoring the reality that Al Qaeda is a non-state movement that defies borders.  Thus, 4 months after we are attacked by a mix of Saudi Arabian, Egyptian, Lebanese, and U.A.E. hijackers, who were directed by a radical terrorist group hiding among the Taliban in Afghanistan, we get Bush giving his nauseating "Axis Of Evil" speech calling out Iraq, Iran, and North Korea?  What the fuck?