Rumors are circulating that Cheney may not be Svengali afterall

Jim Hoaglund in today's Washington Post says that speculation is increasing, inside and out of the Beltway, that Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has now replaced Vice President Cheney as the person with the most influence over President Bush.

Rice, according to Hoaglund's sources, is supposed to have "told Bush in January that he should devote his final two years in office to seeking diplomatic agreements with North Korea and Iran and an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord. That account emphasizes that Rice is not simply outflanking Cheney in intermittent internal policy battles but has won full agreement and support from the president on the strategic goals and methods she and her diplomats are pursuing."

Hoaglund points out that "Bush has always been much more the decision maker than the Cheney-as-puppeteer image conveyed" and to prove his point, he cites a number of occasions on which Bush clearly did not follow Cheney's lead. He didn't take Cheney's advice to go back to the UN to get a second resolution to sanction the use of force in Iraq back in 2003. He didn't listen to Cheney in the aftermath of the invasion either, taking instead, as Hoaglund says, the "distastrous" counsel of proconsul L. Paul Bremer and others.

Hoaglund also claims that Cheney has had a "more relaxed attitude" towards Iran since he entered office because of his tenure at Halliburton, the implication being it was probably not Cheney who was urging Bush to take a hardline stance vis-a-vis the Islamic Republic.