With former Vice President Al Gore winning an Oscar for the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” on global warming, Vice President Dick Cheney last Friday before the annual Conservative Political Action Conference vied to steal Al’s thunder for a more convenient inconvenient truth for himself and President Bush saying: “The enemy we face in the war on terror has made Iraq the primary front in that war. To use a popular phrase this is an inconvenient truth.”

It is, indeed, an inconvenient truth, Mr. Vice President, but why is it that way? What makes an inconvenient truth inconvenient, as with Al Gore’s inconvenient truth about global warming, is the dire truth of the matter rests solely with ourselves, like the exposing, recently, of the inconvenient truth of Al Gore’s home energy bill.

Old Pogo, I believe, captures the essence of inconvenient truth in his immortal words: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Mr. Vice President, isn’t it you and the president himself who are responsible for the virulent cultural reality found today in Iraq and throughout the Middle East by mind-sucking us into the place, by feigning on March 19, 2003, that we were left with no other alternative but to invade.

And going on five years now, our young troops have been made lightning rods for cultural enmity and global jihad.

Mr. Vice President, I wonder when will our nation face up to, at every inch of the bloody way, you’ve played right into the hands of our enemies, as if you’ve gone out of your way to nurse and grow the threat of radical Islam, seeming as if deliberately trying to poison this world with its fear and violence, so to create an environment that you could have yourselves a good old fling with Commander and Chief power.

It’s you, Mr. Vice President, and the president himself, not our enemies, who pushed us to make Iraq the primary front for making war on a tactic, terrorism, which up to the point of the invasion of Iraq had never been used by the Iraqis against us. It’s an insult to our intelligence, purely repugnant, to represent it otherwise.

Remember, Mr. Vice President, how we pulverized Saddam Hussein’s Army in the Persian Gulf War when you were Secretary of Defense, and hadn’t Saddam witnessed, in the fall of 2001, along with the rest of the world, our having gotten only even more frighteningly lethal with the way we made light of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan?

Don’t you reckon that if ever a deterrent had been brought to bear on anyone, it had been brought home on old Saddam Hussein; that by his experiences he wouldn’t have wanted to ever mess with us again?

Or is that, at this bloody point, purely too inconvenient to bring up?

But, now, after the conviction of Scooter Libby, and the cloud left hanging over your head, Mr. Vice President, which special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, went out of his way, in light of what came out in the trial, to remark on, over the outing of CIA agent Valerie Wilson, as it turns out, by you and your personal vetting of information that provided the pretext for invading Iraq, also, having been substantiated in the trial. Have things finally hit critical mass, in public revulsion, for getting to the bottom of what really motivated the bloody predicament we’re in?

There’s “something rotten in Denmark,” rather Washington, that this trial has only begun to expose.

This week the House Oversight Committee is bringing Valerie Wilson before them. I read that Patrick Fitzgerald also is slated to testify. I pray that this is a prelude to your, Mr. Vice President, having to testify; that you’re put in a position of having to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth before the committee.

The outing of Valerie Wilson is atrocious, Mr. Vice President, but never will I forget Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former Chief of Staff of former Secretary of State Collin Powell last year coming forward to say: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. Now it is paying the consequences…”

Huge consequences, indeed, the nation is paying in blood and treasure with this administration having gone so out of its way to make Iraq the front line on the war on terrorism. We critically need to flesh out the inconvenient truth of the matter, Mr. Vice President, of how this all went down.

One can’t help but wonder, as I’ve said, if holding power through war is what your administration isn’t really all about?

Anyway, Mr. Vice President, I find it curious to just read, today, Halliburton, with all the uncertainty in the Middle East, is moving its corporate head quarters closer to the front line of business action — in Dubai. There’s a flagrancy here that’s scary.

Tim O’Leary is a longtime Homer resident and observer of the political scene.