Satanic manipulators of demonic brilliance?

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are widely reviled — especially on the left, though there are a few constitutionalists still muttering, “Excuse me …” — as soulless cynics who “lied” to get us into Iraq.

Clearly, they decided to invade Iraq, and then assigned their underlings to build the best case possible, paying little heed to the notion that a declaration of war was technically required, and that a days-long public debate over declaring war on a state that had not attacked us, that had played no role in the terror attacks of 2001, might have allowed the minority (Rep. Ron Paul, primarily — though one can always hope a few more might have finally struggled to their feet) to ask embarrassing questions.

It may be more than a mere lawyer’s quibble to deny that’s “lying.” How many sales and marketing directors have told their boys to come up with the best sales pitch possible — “You know, without lying outright”?

Is such finagling to exert powers not specifically delegated in the Constitution an impeachable offense? Sure. Just as it was an impeachable offense when Lyndon Johnson did it with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and when Abe Lincoln violated the Constitution to impose a draft and an income tax and to invade the South, given that the Constitution places no restrictions on secession by individual states. (We won’t get into professor Wilson, the Lusitania, and the Hutterite conscientious objectors, today.)

Unfortunately, in each case a congressional majority also committed the same impeachable offense. Who’s going to impeach them?

What’s interesting about Iraq, though — if we can divorce ourselves for a moment from the reality of severed limbs and body bags and a high command that sends boys into the buzz saw but then refuses to let them “sweep clean” — is the way Mr. Bush now whines that if we pull out “precipitously,” either Iran or al-Qaida could end up running the place, which could be worse than where we started out.

Um, pardon me: Don’t you guys go over such likely outcomes before you say, “Let’s roll”? Aren’t there a couple colonels over at the Pentagon who’d be just as eager as puppies to brief you on the most likely political outcomes of an unplanned decapitation of the leadership of any country that’s been run as a top-down satrapy for the past, oh, 4,000 years?

What was the plan to keep those outcomes from happening, dudes?

One of the delicious ironies here is that the Bush-Cheney team — who get branded master calculators and cynical manipulators — seem to have had about as good a “plan” for Iraq as Mickey Rooney and the gang planning to “put on a show in the barn” in one of those old Andy Hardy movies, or Lucy and Ethel going down to Ricky’s club to “surprise the boys” dressed up as exotic dancers.

No one today remembers Dwight D. Eisenhower and his foreign policy masterminds, the Dulles brothers, as satanic manipulators of demonic brilliance.

But how would they have handled the takeover of Iraq?

First they would have established a marginally credible Iraqi (Kurdish, perhaps?) “government in exile,” throwing pricey Georgetown cocktail parties and lobbying Congress to “restore them to power” under some claim to legitimacy dating to 1920 or so. (“And then my blessed uncle hid the Constitution in his shoe …”)

So, if and when we did “roll,” it would have been under the guise of “coming to the aid of the oppressed Kurds,” whose hand-picked (by us) leaders would then have been allowed to lead the victory parade into Baghdad, like De Gaulle and LeClerc “liberating” Paris in 1944.

Finally, about 18 hours after the “all clear,” there would have been a ceremony on a bandstand where the temporary American military governor would have introduced the “new supreme leader,” a smiling guy who left Kirkuk years ago to take his MBA at Wharton, wearing a big red-and-gold hat and a uniform halfway between Saddam Hussein and John Phillip Sousa, only better tailored.

This guy would now be the dictator of Iraq — like the Shah in Iran, like Noriega in Panama — his police-state excesses dismissed as “a sad necessity which they’re all used to in that part of the world” even as the Dulles brothers’ pals in the press would be hailing him in heart-warming feature stories as a “kindler, gentler dictator,” opening health clinics, allowing women to drive cars, hiring Halliburton to get the water and sewer plants back up to speed.

Now THAT would have been cynical and manipulative.

Yet oddly enough, that’s pretty much the way America did things from 1896 through 1976, and no one today (well, possibly excepting Osama bin Laden) remembers that era as one of “satanic manipulation and lies, lies, lies.”

Instead, George Bush, who one gathers is indeed more a checker-player than a chessmaster, allows his neo-conservative buddies to convince him that once Iraq is conquered the local League of Women Voters will spontaneously rise up to form a responsible new government, just the way you’d put out a call for volunteers to staff a new library board in Paramus, N.J.

The crime of the Bush team turns out to have been not cynical manipulation, but rather the absurd idealism of fraternity boys who’ve been too busy partying to spend much time hitchhiking through what the rest of us like to call “actual foreign countries.”

Heck, they don’t even seem to have watched “Lawrence of Arabia.”

History yet written will have a hard time believing such a gang could have come into control of the world’s most powerful empire.

Or maybe not. All mighty empires eventually fall into the hands of idiots. And that’s precisely when the beneficiaries of empire may finally realize how short-sighted they were to sweep aside all those corny old “checks and balances.”

You know: the ones designed to protect them from their own folly.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the novel “The Black Arrow.” See www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?vci=51238921.