A reader writes:
Welcome to 2004! Your rate of catching up to reality has been increasing. Information has a way of doing that. I will over-look the fact that you called Joseph Wilson a two-bit, irrelevant jerk and a political bug. After all you were just articulating what the administration thought of him and not what you think, right? Good. No, the point I want to make is that you are presenting a false choice: Cheney is, in fact, both arrogant and scared. He was arrogant in thinking that he could use the resources of the most powerful nation on Earth to pursue a strategy of global dominance in petroleum production by trumping up a false story of an imminent Iraqi threat and he then became scared that the deception would be discovered by brave reporters investigating the only honest man to emerge from that period.
If you need somebody to draw this out in picture form then please let me know.
More on these lines here. Suffice to say I do not agree that the war in Iraq was about "global dominance in petroleum production."