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The luncheon began with the entry of Canadian dignitaries — Ed Fast, the international trade minister, who spoke on the new European trade deal, and Liberal cabinet veterans Pierre Pettigrew and Bill Graham.

Then, there was a brief pause, then some security guys in suits and among them, walking quickly, a white-haired man, unmistakeable in his hunched shortness. An imperial air followed him to the head table.

Some politicians light up a room with their entrance. Mr. Cheney made it go dark.

“I’m going to put back on my Darth Vader mask,” he said later, switching topics from energy policy to the resurgence of Al-Qaeda as a terrorist threat to the U.S., specifically along the Iraq-Syria border, where there has been a “reassertion and re-energizing, if you will, of Al-Qaeda and fellow travellers.”

“The problem has grown,” said the man who was second-in-command on the darkest day in modern American history.

He spoke of a new terrain of terror stretching from Mali and Niger in the sub-Saharan west, through the Maghreb and the Horn of Africa, into Yemen and the rest of Arabia, all the way east to Pakistan.

Beyond that are the whirling centrifuges of North Korea, enriching nuclear fuel as the world waits and the U.S. is increasingly disengaged, Mr. Cheney said. He lamented the only American soldiers in Iraq today are posted to the Baghdad embassy.

“Our plan was to leave a stay-behind force [in Iraq],” he said

The former Veep has similar complaints about the drawdown in Afghanistan, which he described as an important regional military base for U.S. forces, especially for drone attacks, and he recalled the mayhem that followed previous American retreats there, such as the war with the Soviets.