Why won't Dick Cheney go away?

Yet again, Dick Cheney rears his ugly head, this time speaking at the National Press Club.

But because he is no longer in power, he has now resorted to the tactics of revisionist history. "I do not believe and have never seen any evidence to confirm that [Hussein] was involved in 9/11," Cheney says. "We had that reporting for a while, [but] eventually it turned out not to be true."

No, Mr. Cheney. There never was a connection. The Bush Administration wanted to make that connection as soon as the towers fell, but you had to eventually give up that hope.

Why did we invade Iraq?

For years, I wondered this. It made little sense, except of course as open aggression against another country, a power grab for territory and control in an oil-rich region. Well, OK, that makes a lot of sense, but we're supposed to be the good guys. So, how did W. go to sleep at night, thinking he was doing the right thing, that he was serving a higher purpose and not just naked aggression? What justification did he give himself to settle the disquiet in his soul?

(I know, I'm giving them a lot of credit for having a conscience and a soul. But they still are human beings.)

Weapons of mass destruction? I never believed the pre-war evidence. Colin Powell's presentation at the U.N. lacked the smoking gun that Adlai Stevenson had during the Cuba missile crisis. I don't think the administration really believed that lie. They just had to find ways to prop up the barest appearance of good intentions when that story fell apart. (No weapons of mass destruction? Gee whiz, I coulda swore they were there. My bad.)

For a time, I wondered if W. sought to invade Iraq over the misguided notion that his father was a failure for not "finishing the job" in 1991. But of course the first George Bush had it right. He knew it would be a mistake to take over the whole country. (Because he understood basic principles that every college political science major learns about regional stability and nation building.) Saddam Hussein also was behind an assassination attempt on the elder Bush, but I don't think that was it.

Then, finally, years after the fact, I read that W. had been very excited before the invasion about the idea of bringing democracy to the Middle East. That if somehow Iraq could become a stable country ruled by elections, then democracy and goodwill for the U.S. could spread through the Mideast.

This is my best guess right now, that somehow on top of all the Machiavellian "positives" they saw by invading and conquering Iraq, that when W. went into his shriveled little conscience, when he wondered about his legacy and wondered how history would judge him, he would say to himself that all the hell that he had unleashed would be OK because he had brought democracy to the Middle East.

The problem, however, is that it is foolhardy to bring democracy to a nation through force of arms. You cannot force a people to be free. Countries need to be able to find a solution of their own, find out for themselves what works best. To impose our will on the people of another nation is just wrong.

My youngest son's preschool class is growing butterflies. One of the important lessons with a butterfly is that you have to let them get out of the cocoon on their own. If you break them out of the cocoon before they have the strength to do it, the butterflies won't survive. Let the other countries of the world find their own paths to freedom.