The Bush team still has 18 months to fashion another foreign policy disaster, this time over Iran.
All along Cheney has pushed harder for military action - how, mutter his acolytes, can we possibly leave the next president facing a nuclear-armed regime in Tehran?
And now, just as with Iraq five years ago, leaks that point to war are multiplying. Iran, we are told, is in league with al-Qa'ida. It is arming insurgents in Iraq so that these latter can kill more Americans.
Not long ago, Bush seemed to have accepted that America was in no shape for another military adventure. But who can be sure that however wretched Dick Cheney's track record, he will not prevail again?
Behind every new US disaster has been the hand
of Dick Cheney - yet still he goes on
So now we know - sort of. Six years after the event, The Washington Post published this week a partial list of those consulted by the task force headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney, set up by President George Bush soon after he took office in January 2001, to map a new energy strategy for the US.
In a way, it's no big deal. The list, which the administration has fought tooth and nail through the courts to keep secret, reveals that the task force relied preponderantly upon experts from, and lobbyists for, the big oil, gas and utility companies.
Given the industry backgrounds of the President and the Vice-President, and the massive campaign contributions they and their Republican Party received from the energy companies, this was precisely as everyone suspected.
Environmental groups were ignored, until a token meeting near the end of the task force's deliberations.
The final report, issued in mid-2001, was no great surprise either, with its emphasis on boosting supplies - by opening up the Arctic wildlife refuge for oil drilling, among other things - rather than curbing consumption, as the environmentalists had demanded in vain .
But the symbolic importance of the affair was, and remains, enormous. It set the tone for everything that would come after.
It offered a first taste for the obsessive secrecy of the incoming administration, underlining how the old adage about government in the Soviet Union - that you knew nothing but understood everything - applied to this White House almost as much as it did to the Communist-era Kremlin.
It demonstrated how Bush, prodded by Cheney, would use every means at his disposal to remove shackles from the executive branch. In short, it was an early, and deadly accurate, clue to how Bush rule would work.
The untried and incurious President would reign. But his government would be shaped largely by his vastly experienced Vice-President, contemptuous of Congress and so skilled in the ways of Washington bureaucracy that his authority across every branch of the administration would come to resemble that of a British prime minister.
It would not be so bad if the decisions that emerged from this rule by cabal had been wise and farsighted.
But this White House, headed by the first president in history with an MBA, and a vice-president who was the chairman of a giant oil services group before he was picked as running mate in summer 2000, demonstrated anything but the efficiency of the boardroom.
Its congenital, obsessive secrecy has bred not wisdom and foresight, but monumental incompetence - for which, at least until the Democrats recaptured Congress last November, no one was accountable.
In almost every case, the hand of Dick Cheney has been evident: from the ill-planned war in Iraq to the shame of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, from the demeaning refusal to renounce torture to the scandal of illegal warrantless wiretapping - all of them quietly championed by a vice-president utterly beyond public scrutiny.
Bush, after all, is obliged to hold press conferences, make public speeches and deliver the odd primetime television address to make his case. Cheney faces no such requirement.
But for him, a low-profile is insufficient. His goal is absolute invisibility; hence his order that even the standard secret service logs of visitors to his office should be destroyed.
Hence, too, the quite extraordinary dispute that arose when an obscure government oversight agency requested Cheney's staff to co-operate in classifying its official documents, as the White House and every other part of the federal government does routinely.
At first the Vice-President's men refused. Then, when the agency persisted with its demands, they tried to have it abolished.
When that gambit failed, his advisers tried another, even more absurd, claiming that because the Vice-President was, under the constitution, also president of the Senate, Cheney was actually part of Congress and the legislative branch, and thus exempt from the regulations in the first place.
This, it should be stressed, from the man who invokes unfailingly the very doctrine of executive privilege that Richard Nixon deployed in his vain attempt to prevent publication of the fatal Oval Office tapes on Watergate - and which Cheney used successfully to keep the workings of his energy task force out of the public eye.
Of course, Jay Leno, David Letterman and the rest of the late-night comedy hosts made hay with it.
But an attempt to fell Cheney with ridicule is akin to taking a peashooter to bring down an elephant.
As we saw after an earlier torrent of ridicule, at his accidental shooting last year of a quail-hunting partner, which Cheney typically also tried to keep secret, the man's hide is armour-plated.
Only when the House of Representatives threatened to take the vice-President at his word, and cut off $5m of funding for the Vice-President for his job as an executive branch official, did he finally yield, and consent for his office's papers to be classified as everyone else's.
Astonishingly, though, our man not only survives but flourishes. His approval ratings - barely 20 per cent in some polls - may be even lower than those of his nominal boss.
But insofar as one can divine such things in Kremlinesque Washington, his influence appears as strong as ever, despite the criminal conviction of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, his former chief of staff, despite the inglorious departure of his old mentor and ally Donald Rumsfeld, and despite the débâcle in Iraq.
Back in Bush's first term, the Cheney-Rumsfeld faction saw off Colin Powell in the battle for Bush's ear, with the national security adviser Condoleezza Rice standing mostly on the sidelines.
The replacement of Rumsfeld at the Pentagon by the cagey and cautious Bob Gates, one of Bush senior retainers, and the supposed reincarnation of Rice - now Secretary of State - as a sensible realist in the Colin Powell mould, suggested that Cheney might soon lose his grip on policy.
Such reports may be premature. The Bush team still has 18 months to fashion another foreign policy disaster, this time over Iran.
All along Cheney has pushed harder for military action - how, mutter his acolytes, can we possibly leave the next president facing a nuclear-armed regime in Tehran?
And now, just as with Iraq five years ago, leaks that point to war are multiplying. Iran, we are told, is in league with al-Qa'ida. It is arming insurgents in Iraq so that these latter can kill more Americans.
Not long ago, Bush seemed to have accepted that America was in no shape for another military adventure. But who can be sure that however wretched Dick Cheney's track record, he will not prevail again?
