'I was right about Iraq.' It was Dick Cheney's war, and he owned it until the very end.

WASHINGTON – His now-infamous claim that “we will be greeted as liberators" will forever tie former Vice President Dick Cheney to the Iraq War launched soon after his fateful March 2003 remarks.

But would the war, arguably one of the most disastrous and avoidable in American history, have happened without Cheney?

Historians may quibble. But the answer that emerges from a review of Cheney’s actions and statements appears to be a definitive no.

Cheney was both a chief architect of the war and its most influential advocate in selling his boss, then-President George W. Bush, on the idea of a preemptive attack to topple Saddam Hussein and occupy the oil-rich former U.S. ally.

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