Christopher Layne: Dick Cheney has led America down the road to hell in Iraq

VICE President Dick Cheney's Friday speech to the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue in Sydney was merely a stale rehash of justifications for the George W. Bush administration's policies, especially in the Middle East; policies that have been rejected by a majority of the American public and by Congress.

Still, Cheney's comments are important because they demonstrate that he and Bush are determined to give no ground in their goal of attaining victory in Iraq.

In November 2006, of course, the Democrats won a resounding triumph in the US congressional elections: a victory that was essentially a repudiation of the administration's Iraq policy.

It was widely speculated that the election returns - coupled with the publication of the Iraq Study Group report, and Robert Gates's appointment as Secretary of Defence - heralded the return of the foreign policy realists to influence in Washington, and a major shift in the administration's Iraq policy.

But Bush's surge-escalation in Iraq, and Cheney's Sydney speech indicate that the administration remains indifferent to the views of Congress and the American electorate, and to the counsels of the foreign policy realists who held high office in the George H. W. Bush administration. Already having put itself in a deep hole in Iraq, the administration seems determined to dig itself an even deeper one.

As The Economist recently observed: "Dick Cheney comes across as a man firmly in grip of an ideology". The ideology in question is that of the American neo-conservatives who favour a strategy so muscular as to be described glowingly by its proponents as the blueprint for an American "empire". American power is a fact of geopolitical life and invokes frequent comparisons with the Roman Empire at its zenith.

For policymakers, however, the important questions are how and for what purposes will US power be used? Here, the administration has succumbed to hubris.

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Christopher Layne holds the George Bush School of Government and Public Service Faculty Professorship of International Affairs at Texas A & M University. He is author of The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Cornell University Press, 2006).