The 12 Year Itch

Dick Cheney likes to read history, especially military history. He disappears into his well-stocked library at the vice president's mansion for hours at a time, reading about Churchill and World War II or other war leaders in other crises down through the ages. Last fall, the vice president read "An Autumn of War" by Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist who lives on a farm in California. In his book, a collection of columns published online by National Review in the weeks after 9-11, Hanson writes that war is the natural state of mankind. Great leaders understand this, according to Hanson. They are not fooled by utopian visions about world peace; they face evil and deal with it. Cheney told his aides that Hanson's book reflected his philosophy.

Before Christmas, Hanson was invited to dine with Cheney and talk to his aides, who also read his book. Cheney was his usual taciturn self, says Hanson, but his questions seemed to indicate that he was interested in statesmen who became warriors, who realized, reluctantly but surely, that military force was unavoidable and necessary. He also seemed intrigued by leaders who were vilified in their own time for being brutal--like General Sherman on his march through Georgia--but whom historians later vindicated for acting audaciously, and decisively.

Hanson was impressed with Cheney's "tragic view of mankind," akin to the ancient Greeks. A man of few words, Cheney may have more in common with the Lone Ranger than Pericles. "It's more Wyoming, the code of the West," said a top aide to the vice president. "It's 'You're welcome around here, neighbor. But don't run your cattle on my land. I'm not going to sit back for that'." Whether ancient Greece or Old West, the vice president has a world view, and it is not the one shared by members of the East Coast foreign-policy establishment, men and women of moderation who believe in reason and dialogue, who think that problems can be talked out. Cheney believes that the world is a dangerous place, that diplomacy can be a trap, that force is sometimes the only choice. Many, probably a majority of Americans, particularly those living in the "red states" between the coasts, agree with Cheney. More to the point, so does President George W. Bush of Midland, Texas.

With his strong religious faith, President Bush has a more upbeat, soul-saving Christian take on life than his somewhat Hobbesian vice president. Bush had something like a conversion experience after 9-11; he went from a politician who was glad, and perhaps a little surprised, to be president, to a war leader with a providential sense of duty and destiny. Together, Bush and Cheney have presented an unwavering determination to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. Almost messianic in their conviction, Bush and most of his top advisers have frightened or perplexed their European allies and many opinion makers in the United States.

The media elites have regularly complained that the Bush administration has failed to give a compelling or even adequate reason to rush into war with Iraq. Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, yes, but he does not seem poised to use them or share them with terrorists. Earlier administrations, including that of Bush's father, were willing to live with Saddam. Is there some underlying explanation why this President Bush was hellbent on war?

The Bush administration is not known as a hotbed of intellectualism, and that may be one reason that so much attention has been paid to the "neocons," the group of neoconservative thinkers who have important posts at the Defense Department and in the vice president's office, especially Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, who was once Wolfowitz's deputy in an earlier administration. The neocons have a grand dream, possibly farfetched, of knocking off Saddam Hussein as the first step in reshaping the Middle East and making it free and democratic. It is widely whispered around Washington that Wolfowitz &Co. are in some nefarious way fronting for Israel, putting Zionist interests over those of the United States. The neocons are an important presence in the councils of power, and Wolfowitz has been smart about pushing his views. But neocon ideology would still be limited to interesting think-tank seminars were it not for a far more powerful force driving America down the road to Baghdad.