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At the start of each of Bush's bad ideas is Dick Cheney
In Sunday's New York Times, Iraq's new interim president, Iyad Alawi, thanked Americans for liberating his country and then made a simple request: please bring back the Iraqi army.

Given what we just put into defeating the Iraqi army, that might sound like an odd proposal. But it's difficult to find anyone today who thinks disbanding the Iraqi army was a good idea in the first place. And few thought it was a good idea at the time. Doing so not only worsened the security vacuum that now plagues the country, it took hundreds of thousands of armed men and - in a pen stroke - made them both unemployed and harder to control.

Who was the senior administration official most responsible for this ill-conceived idea?

Vice President Dick Cheney.

If that surprises you, it shouldn't. The rough patch the White House has been in since the beginning of the summer has provided an abundance of new evidence for the great open secret of the Bush era: the serial poor judgment and, in many cases, manifest incompetence of the vice president....