Dick Cheney, whatever his other faults, is a brilliant man. Talking with him in any detail is a bit like channeling the ghosts of Cardinal Richelieu, Prince Metternich or other great geopolitical gamesmen of past ages.

You hear a world vision that is at once far darker and more complex than any you’ve imagined, expressed with an informed logic that is formidable and yet still strangely suspect. His arguments rarely if ever contain any twinge of doubt and it is this certainty itself that raises red flags, giving off whiffs of a fanaticism largely closed to countervailing points of view.

I suppose he may be open to discussing fine points of how to preserve and extend American military/economic dominance over the world, in much the same way a religious leader might be willing to banter about minor nuances of church doctrine with a devoted acolyte or disciple. But express any doubts whatsoever about anything fundamental, and you tangibly feel the drawbridge of his mind shutting against you. You’re either hopelessly naive, not very smart, or blinded by liberal twaddle.

Conceding for a moment that one or more of these reactions may have a grain of truth, it nevertheless is sobering to realize one of the key elected officials in the world’s stellar democracy has little ability to accommodate or consider dissenting views.

I don’t mean to imply in any of this that I’m anything more than vaguely acquainted with the vice president. I interviewed him a few times when he was in Congress and I think once after he became defense secretary. But I remember those encounters well, and they’re about all I have to go on as I try to understand the administration’s avid hunger for war with Iraq. Maybe President Bush and Cheney aren’t completely in lock step, but I don’t have any doubt Cheney’s ideas form the rigid backbone of administration philosophies.

Particularly memorable to me were remarks Cheney made a year or so before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end product of a long and clever campaign that reached its goal in the Reagan-Bush Sr. administration. Cheney and like-minded people wanted to bring the U.S.S.R. down at almost any cost short of nuclear war, and were ruthless about achieving that end. But Cheney knew and feared the instability that would result, speaking in the most serious tones about the need to tightly control the spread of ethnic and religious violence as Islamic republics splintered away from Russia.

The loosening of communist ropes in the Balkans certainly unleashed awful violence that was destabilizing and tremendously costly in terms of lives, while within the actual borders of the old U.S.S.R., only in Chechnya has there been real chaos. But I can see Cheney and company wanting to establish a strong permanent beachhead in the Middle East, with a large military presence there serving to dampen revolutionary enthusiasms in the heart of oil country, which extends far into the former Soviet Union.

In this scenario, the lives of a few hundred Americans and many thousands of Iraqis will be a small price to pay for guaranteed cheap oil to quench American corporate thirst. At the same time, it delivers the strongest possible message to Islamic regimes that they must keep their own fanatical elements in check, or else face our wrath. And a nice fringe benefit is that it allows Bush to kill the guy who tried to have his father assassinated. In grand terms of the Great Game fought for centuries over control of the Middle East, this could make us the big mega-lotto winner of all time.

I’m not nearly as liberal as some people assume – I’ve been a gun enthusiast since I was about 20 minutes old, believe in the death penalty in some instances, and think war is frequently justified – my family’s fought in most of them starting with the Revolution.

But launching a war and armed occupation of a country on the other side of the world that has made no threat against us in years is contrary to American principles. Even if you are conservative, this isn’t. We’re not the nation of small farmers and shopkeepers we used to be, but our national disposition still is one of live and let live, staying the heck out of foreign entanglements. To launch a war for strategic reasons, based on the thinnest of pretexts, simply isn’t who we are.

Bush supposedly doesn’t care what the polls say, he’s going to war. I’m sure it’ll happen, no matter what we want. But please, please remember come election time that the men in office took us down a road we never wanted to go. Even if it makes a certain cold-hearted Cheneyish sense, it makes us into a nation we never wanted to be.

– M.S.W.

Matt Winters is editor of the Chinook Observer