In 2006, at the height of the sectarian conflict which had arisen due to the US-led invasion of Iraq, Jon Stewart, an American comedian, leaned across his desk and, in mock confidentiality, asked his guest, Senator John McCain, "Is Dick Cheney crazy?"
Cheney had made one of his more fantastic pronouncements, "the insurgency is in its last gasps", which followed some of the more outrageous of his claims - "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction" and "we know that Saddam's intelligence people met with Mohammed Atta [one of the plane bombers] in Prague to help plan 9/11" and "when we invade Iraq we'll be welcomed as liberators".
Cheney has now begun channelling the ghost of Winston Churchill. Writing in the June 23 Wall Street Journal, Cheney says of Obama's policies in Iraq, Syria and the Middle East, "Rarely has a US president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many".
Yes. That's true if you don't count the failures of George W. Bush and those of his chief enabler, Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney. Cheney's borrowing of Churchillian cadences ends their resemblance. Churchill, for all his flaws, did succeed in helping to win his last war. And after a long career when he was known for his bellicose preferences, Churchill at last declared, "Jaw, jaw, is always better than war, war". Not so Dick Cheney. He would like to see the US resume its military engagement with the Arab countries. Like the other neo-cons who promoted the Iraq disaster as something easy, quick and able to be done on the cheap - "Iraqi oil will pay for it" - Cheney's over-the-top criticisms of Obama's policies represent an unprecedented political attack by a former administration on a succeeding one. The custom had been for former presidents and vice-presidents to retire to oblivion, write memoirs and garner funds to build themselves a library and otherwise remain silent as George W. Bush has done.
What can Cheney's motives be in speaking out? Prior to his WSJ op-ed, Cheney had been involved in his daughter Liz's failed campaign to take the place in the US Senate of an old family friend, Mike Enzi of Wyoming. In the process, Liz Cheney tried to overcome charges of being insufficiently conservative by throwing her lesbian sister, Mary, under a bus, in attacking gay marriage. Dick Cheney, campaigning for Liz, was forced to choose between his daughters, thus creating a very public rupture in the politically required picture of happy family life.
It's got to be a come-down for anyone to resume near-normal life after having been at the centre of power. It's relatively easy for an exited administration official to criticise the succeeding one. It just isn't done. In the case of Cheney and Bush there is a particular frisson to the criticism. Bush left the White House with an approval rating of 23 per cent, one of the lowest ever for a President, and he remains the butt of late-night comedians' jokes. Cheney is held in even lower esteem in the minds of Americans.
Cheney's recommendations to engage US forces militarily in Middle East conflicts runs completely counter to the prevailing political winds in the US with 64 per cent of Americans strongly opposed - largely in response to Cheney's previous work in Iraq.
Cheney's claim is that by the time he left office Iraq was stable and peaceful. Tell that to the victims of the monthly bombings that have continued.
Better yet is Cheney's contention that Obama should have stationed 20,000 residual forces in Iraq and not completely withdrawn in 2011. That may be a subtle stab at his ex-boss, George W. Bush, who in December 2008 signed an agreement with Iraq which specified just that, withdrawal in 2011 with no residual forces.
The question is why anyone would listen to someone who has been so wrong about so much for so long.