Now that Cheney is in trouble we are going to see much more criticism of the way he ran the country. The most recent piece is by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson who was Colin Powell's Chief of Staff until last January. You can read his whole speech here. This quote from the attached article gives the main message quite well:
In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: "What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.
"Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences."
Mr Wilkerson said such secret decision-making was responsible for mistakes such as the long refusal to engage with North Korea or to back European efforts on Iran.
It also resulted in bitter battles in the administration among those excluded from the decisions.
"If you're not prepared to stop the feuding elements in the bureaucracy as they carry out your decisions, you are courting disaster. And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran."
We have been given hints of this all along. The Bush administration has always been run like a feudal hierarchy, and so has this country for the last five years. Interesting.