So who is benefiting from our expenditure of blood and treasure on Iraq's oil fields? So long as the strategy works, anyone with whom we do business. Including China, of course, even though not a single People's Liberation Army soldier need ever set foot away from Chinese soil.

The problem is, the strategy is failing. The effort to control the oil fields is leading, very rapidly, to increasing oil prices, a permanent volatility of supply and an inflationary slowdown in economic activity both in the United States and abroad.

The implications are simple. We can live with any security system that permits oil to come to market in an orderly way. Even though none of the Middle East oil regimes is security safe, the West can, and does, buy oil from Iran. It could, and did, buy oil from Saddam Hussein. It buys oil from the Saudis, despite their misuse of some of the revenues to finance a global network of terror. Security issues are raised by each of these cases. But the security risks can't be dealt with by physical occupation of oil fields.

Obviously, Cheney doesn't get this at all.

So let's return to that Aug. 26, 2002, speech, in which Cheney sought to justify a military invasion of Iraq on grounds of America's national security. His speech emphasized the threat posed by Saddam to the United States stemming from his pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons; his concealment of that pursuit; his persistent plotting to foil and frustrate U.N. inspectors; and his appalling record of regional aggression, against Iran and then against Kuwait. Cheney wrapped these factors into a frightening bundle of conclusions:

"Should all of Saddam Hussein's aggressive ambitions be realized, the implications would be enormous, for the Middle East, for the United States, and for the peace of the world. The whole range of weapons of mass destruction then would rest in the hands of a dictator who has already shown his willingness to use such weapons, and has done so, both in his war with Iran and against his own people. Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and seated atop 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten America's friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail."

According to Cheney, Saddam was an ambitious, aggressive, dangerous man with access to vast wealth and technical capacities, including WMD. There was the threat that he would someday soon choke off our access -- and that of our friends and allies -- to the oil on which we rely, defending his position with "nuclear blackmail." Therefore, Cheney concluded, the United States must act, lest by waiting it find itself helpless against the man and the weapons he might soon control.

The threat to our supply of oil was, on the surface, an impressive argument -- by far the leading edge of the Bush administration's case for war. But Cheney and others did not ask the obvious question: To whom would Saddam sell his oil, if not on the world market? The alternative customer -- the Soviet empire -- was no longer in existence! Would he hold it in the ground and starve?

As we now know, the supposed facts that Cheney advanced were not true, and should have been suspect at the time. But the underlying principle did not depend on whether his combination of psychological inference, history and current information was correct, for Cheney believed we were entitled to act on presumption and inference. Cheney held -- and holds today -- that America's responsibility is to assume the worst, and to act today to prevent the worst, on the off-chance that the assumption might be correct.

This is the meaning of the declaration -- at the outset of the Aug. 26 speech, at West Point and elsewhere by Bush -- that the "old doctrines of security do not apply." Cheney clarified:

"In the days of the Cold War, we were able to manage the threat with strategies of deterrence and containment. But it's a lot tougher to deter enemies who have no country to defend. And containment is not possible when dictators obtain weapons of mass destruction, and are prepared to share them with terrorists who intend to inflict catastrophic casualties on the United States."

The claim that "containment is not possible when dictators obtain weapons of mass destruction" was false on its face. What about the Soviet Union? That country, governed by dictators, had many such weapons. And yet it was contained with great success for four decades. The Soviet Union collapsed in the end without inflicting so much as a single external casualty from any of these weapons. Nor did the Soviets ever contemplate sharing agents of mass destruction with terrorists, despite manifold Western fantasies (and James Bond movies) to that effect.

But Cheney's assertion, though nonsensical as stated, was not inconsistent with his core beliefs. He had always rejected the doctrines of deterrence and containment -- even as they applied to the Soviet Union. His position in 2002 was not a new one, crafted by strategists thinking afresh about the world after the Cold War. It was, instead, a direct return to the fantasy of world domination, powered by the atomic monopoly, that took hold in American military minds in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and that threatened the security and survival of the world for 20 years after that.

Preventive self-defense is nothing else than the most dangerous subterranean tendency of Cold War bombardiers LeMay and Power, who favored an unprovoked first strike against the Soviet Union. It is the doctrine rightly ridiculed in "Dr. Strangelove," resurrected and brought to you live in the nightmare we call Iraq.

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