First Stop, Iraq

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But Cheney wasn't entirely in Powell's camp. In fact, in his taciturn, deliberate way, Cheney was starting to go through a shift in his intellectual bearings. "Dick Cheney," says Wolfowitz, "is someone whose view of the need to get rid of Saddam Hussein was transformed by Sept. 11--by the recognition of the danger posed by the connection between terrorists and WMDs and by the growing evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaeda." After Sept. 11, Cheney began running a self-education seminar on Islam and the Middle East, meeting with experts, a Cheney aide says, "to discuss how might a postwar Iraq take shape and what are the prospects for democracy in the region." Cheney, friends say, has gradually abandoned his former skepticism about the potential for democracy in the Middle East. Among those who have influenced him: Bernard Lewis, a Princeton historian, and Fouad Ajami, a former colleague of Wolfowitz's at Johns Hopkins. Both men passionately believe that the lack of democracy and pluralism are central to the chronic instability of the Middle East and that any serious policy there must aspire to do more than leave existing autocracies in power.

Republican Congressman Porter Goss recalls a telling moment a few months after Sept. 11, when he was among the guests at a "sort of off-night dinner" at the Vice President's residence. Lewis was there too, and Cheney, when he arrived, promptly asked the professor to conduct a seminar on Islam, the Koran and Muslim attitudes toward Americans. Cheney expressed his views most forcefully in a major speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville in August 2002. "Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits to the region," he said, including "the chance to promote the values that can bring lasting peace." He quoted Ajami's conviction that after liberation, the streets of Baghdad and Basra would "erupt in joy in the same way as the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans." By last summer, to the surprise of many old critics, Cheney's intellectual journey was complete. William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, the Koran of neoconservative thought, was critical when Bush chose Cheney as a running mate precisely because of his defense of the way the Gulf War ended. Now, says Kristol, neoconservatives happily "consider him a fellow-traveler." But a couple of others still had to be persuaded to come along on the journey.

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