Imagine

Probably, instead of the nation we actually sent troops to, we should have gone to war in Cheney's Iraq.

I initially thought that Dick Cheney was just an evil pathological liar. No more, I think that he is truly delusional - certifiably insane. Oregonian columnist David Sarasohn gives us a view of Dick Cheney's alternate universe in IMAGINARY IRAQ.

I n every day's news, inescapable and bloody and increasingly dismal, there is Iraq. But if it's too discouraging, if the news and film and forecasts are just too much for you, there is an alternative.

There is Iraq as seen by Vice President Cheney.

You won't find it on any map, and you won't see it in the news reports, and United States troops don't seem to encounter it in their daily patrols, but it's a remarkable, heart-warming place.

"They've had three national elections with higher turnout than we have here in the United States," the vice president told radio talker Rush Limbaugh last week. "If you look at the general overall situation, they're doing remarkably well."

To see Cheney's Iraq, the one where the Iraqi government is "doing remarkably well," you just have to pull back far enough to take a general view, to get a perspective where the details don't get in the way. From Cheney's Iraq, you're too far away to hear the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, say Thursday that the recent crackdown hadn't worked and that, "The violence is indeed disheartening."

In Cheney's Iraq, that kind of complaining just misses the point.

"Well," the vice president told Limbaugh, "I think there's some natural level of concern out there because, in fact, it wasn't over instantaneously."

Sarasohn then reminds us that WWII wasn't instantaneous either but it didn't last as long as the Iraq war. Dick Cheney's Iraq.

The vice president's Iraq, of course, has always been a place far enough from Baghdad that cell phones won't cover the distance. It was a place where, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction," and "has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." Still, fighting there would be no problem because, "My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators."

Probably, instead of the nation we actually sent troops to, we should have gone to war in Cheney's Iraq.

Of course we have reached a point where about the only one left in Cheney's universe is Cheney and his President but in Cheney's world everything is just peachy.

Now, in Washington as well as in national polling the widespread feeling is that U.S. policy in Iraq needs a different direction. Senate Armed Services Chairman John Warner, R-Va., has returned from Baghdad to warn the situation is "going sideways," and the president has named former Secretary of State James Baker III to head a commission to re-examine the policy; nobody expects it to report that the policy is doing fine.

But in Cheney's Iraq, the vice president told Time firmly, "(W)e're not looking for an exit strategy; we're looking for victory."

There, apparently, victory is in sight, and people don't keep talking about car bombings -- even though, OK, maybe the insurgency isn't in its last throes. In fact, Iraqis "are doing remarkably well" in Dick Cheney's Iraq.

Unfortunately, more and more people keep dying in the real one.

People have been put away for delusions not nearly as delusional as Dick Cheney's. In addition people are dying because of Dick Cheney's delusions.