When it comes to rationalizing the administration’s decision to invade Iraq, Cheney continues to scrupulously avoid any contamination of his thinking by facts.

In an interview with ABC News, here’s what Mr. Dick spewed (nullus):

“As I look at the intelligence with respect to Iraq, what they got wrong was that there weren’t any stockpiles.”

“What they found was that Saddam Hussein still had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction. He had the technology, he had the people, he had the basic feed stock.”

Cheney added that, given Saddam Hussein’s capabilities, reputation and track record of brutality, “this was a bad actor, and the country’s better off, the world’s better off with Saddam gone, and I think we made the right decision, in spite of the fact that the original NIE was off in some of its major judgments.”

Somehow, the Iraq Study Group, after exhaustive investigation, had concluded that, at the time we invaded, Iraq’s WMD program had been dead for 12 years. Iraq did not have the technology or the basic feed stock, even if it had the people.

In October, Duelfer released a preliminary report finding that in March 2003 — the month of the invasion — Saddam did not have any WMD stockpiles and had not started any program to produce them.

The Iraq Survey Group report said that Iraq’s WMD program was essentially destroyed in 1991 and Saddam ended the country’s nuclear program after the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

I think that henceforth Cheney should just invoke an incontrovertible reason for invading Iraq. The telltale gleam in Saddam’s eye would do very nicely.