The invasion of Iraq was in many ways Dick Cheney's war, just as the George W. Bush administration had been in some respects Cheney's administration. Within the top ranks the vice president had been the leading proponent of a war to oust Saddam Hussein from power. Inside the administration Cheney had also been the most forceful in arguing that Iraq possesed weapons of mass destruction. In the year before the start of the war Cheney had made numerous visits to the CIA to talk with its analysts about the evidence of Iraq's involvement in weapons programs. It was a remarkable, hands-on role for a vice president of the United States.

Serving in the George W. Bush administration permitted Cheney to give much freer vent to his own determinedly conservative views than he ever had in the Ford administration or the first Bush administration. His unique talent, as he recognized early in his career, was to convey a sense of soothing solemnity; Cheney could make whatever he said sound so obvious, reasonable and self-evident that listeners often didn't stop to question it. His cool demeanor and his aura of chamber of commerce prudence were the traits that had once caused congressional reporters to describe Cheney inaccurately (to his own irritation) as a "moderate," while labeling others whose views and voting records were similar as conservatives. In fact, the higher Cheney rose, the more conservative he became.

Cheney had discovered in the mid-1990s that he was unable to run a successful campaign for president himself. He didn't have enough funds, name recognition or popular appeal. But Cheney had managed to link with George W. Bush, who proved to be the most proficient fund-raiser in the history of American politics. The result of that partnership was to give Cheney a large part of what he had sought from the job of president (a dominant role in running the federal government) while sparing him from the parts of the job he liked least (the ceremonial and symbolic aspects of the presidency).

When it came to military and intelligence issues, Cheney, as a former defense secretary and member of the House Intelligence Committee, wielded extrordinary influence in the administration back room decision making. He had his own staff and an extensive network of former aides throughout the foreign policy apparatus; they recognized that he took defense and foreign policy issues seriously. This network of aides and former aides had joined with Cheney in pushing for military intervention to overthrow Saddam Hussein. A picture taken in the midst of the Iraq War, the day before American troops captured Baghdad, shows Cheney pointing happily at Wolfowitz, with Scooter Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, sitting behind the vice president and Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense, alongside Wolfowitz: hawks at the peak of triumph.

Cheney had come a long way from the era when he had served as Donald Rumsfeld's doorkeeper, supervising Christmas card lists and the repairs of the White House plumbing. He had become perhaps the most powerful vice president in American History.