KEY POINTS:
How, one wonders, when the United States Government has been revealed as a hollow sham, did we get it - or, more exactly, him - so wrong? I refer to Dick Cheney, Vice-President by rank, yet in effect chief executive of America Inc.
The Washington Post has set out in quite breathtaking detail Cheney's unseen yet unshakeable grasp on the levers of power in Washington.
Why did no one warn about this when his nominal boss, George W. Bush, entered the White House 6 1/2 long years ago?
Whatever their view of Bush, in 2000 people tended to welcome his choice of Cheney for Vice-President. The future boss might be callow and ignorant of the world, but Cheney seemed a thoroughly known quantity.
After all, he'd been around for ever - chief of staff to President Ford in the 1970s, congressman and then Secretary of Defence in the 80s and 90s. In the first Gulf War, he was the safest of pairs of hands, before moving to the private sector as boss of the energy services group Halliburton.
He would bring with him huge experience and - rare in a Vice-President - no ambition for the top job. Cheney, we imagined, would be Merlin to the raw and untested King Arthur, dispensing wise and frank advice, an elder statesman with nothing left to prove.
Yes, he was a conservative. But the record suggested he was a reasonable man, a conservative with a small "c" who didn't raise his voice or wear his ideology on his sleeve. You might disagree with him. By and large, however, you respected him.
But was there ever a greater collective misjudgment? What happened to turn this non-threatening figure into the most powerful Vice-President in the country's history, who rides roughshod over the US Constitution and uses his proximity to the President to bypass the normal decision-making process - so secretive that Richard Nixon seems the patron saint of open government by comparison?
To be fair, even some in a position to know were fooled. Brent Scowcroft was National Security Adviser under the first President Bush, when Cheney ran the Pentagon.
"I consider Cheney a good friend," Scowcroft told the New Yorker magazine in 2005. "I've known him for 30 years. But Dick Cheney I don't know any more."
Scowcroft believes September 11, 2001, changed Cheney's world view, that the small-c conservative was transformed into a dark and scowling Hobbesian, now convinced that laws counted less than the principle of smiting your enemies before they smite you.
Yet the "new" Cheney was in evidence even earlier.
In early 2001, he chaired an energy policy task force that refused even to say who had testified to it. Environmental groups and some Congressmen went to the courts to challenge the secrecy. As would become usual, Cheney won.
Thus the stage was set. Over the past six years I've often run into old journalist friends who, like me, covered the Kremlin in its sealed Communist heyday. Invariably we were struck by the similarities between Moscow then and Washington now - how the adage about rule by general secretaries applied equally to life under George W. Bush: you knew nothing, but understood everything. So it was here.
Just as there were factions in the Politburo, there were factions in the Bush Administration. We further knew that not only was the hardline faction led by Cheney but also, thanks to Cheney, it prevailed.
The comparison extends only so far. In Russia - then or now - the press could never have published such material as the Washington Post has. But the Post's articles confirm that everything we suspected was going on - and then some.
So the truth about the recent governance of America has emerged, of a President careless with detail, who has outsourced much of the decision making to a Vice-President who operates with total mastery of the bureaucratic process and no hindrance from the man who, nominally, is his boss.
Paul O'Neill, Bush's first Treasury Secretary, who was sacked midway through the President's first term after clashing with Cheney, called the Vice-President "the puppeteer".
The neo-conservatives who have propelled Bush's foreign policy might feel the same. Cheney was never one of them. Yet he used their naive, idealistic belief in bringing democracy to the Middle East as a veil for his own darker designs for Iraq.
- INDEPENDENT
