The Axis Of
Evil Is It For Real?
What Bush
is really saying when he talks tough about rogue states
2002.02.11
TIME
By Massimo Calabresi
For a moment last week it looked as if George
W. Bush was about to declare war on three enemies at once. During
his State of the Union speech, when the President asserted that
Iran, Iraq and North Korea "constitute an axis of evil,"
he fired a shot that had been months in the making. Since the
fall, Bush had been worrying that terrorists might get their
hands on nuclear, biological or chemical weapons--and he wanted
to warn rogue states not to help them do it. So in January the
Defense Department drew up an assessment of the danger and channeled
it back to the White House, where two speechwriters, Michael
Gerson and David Frum, came up with what they thought was the
perfect rallying cry.
Bush liked their phrase--"axis of evil"--from the
start, catching the historical reference to the World War II
alliance among Germany, Italy and Japan. So after 11 drafts
circulated among his top advisers, he stood before Congress,
the country and the world last Tuesday, clenched his fist and
delivered the line with gusto, then made a vow. "I will
not wait on events while the dangers gather," he said.
"I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer.
The United States of America will not permit the world's most
dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive
weapons." He drew a rousing cheer from the crowd; but as
people caught their breath, they had to wonder precisely what
Bush had in mind.
As those questions mounted the next day--allies wondered if
Bush was moving toward some sort of unilateral, pre-emptive
strike--the Administration scaled back its rhetoric. A senior
White House official cautioned reporters not to read too much
into the President's remarks. But on Thursday Bush and his team
cranked it up again. The President warned Iran, Iraq and North
Korea that they are on his "watch list" and that "they
better get their house in order." National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice vowed that the U.S. would "use every tool
at our disposal" to turn back the threat.
If the stop-and-go saber rattling was a sign of disagreement
among senior Bush officials, there was no doubt that the hard-liners
had won again. The "axis of evil" line was in many
ways a repudiation of policies that the Administration's lonely
moderate, Secretary of State Colin Powell, has championed since
the early days of the current presidency. Powell's first major
conflict with the White House came last year, when he expressed
a desire to continue talks with North Korea begun during the
Clinton years. Bush's rhetoric last week made that almost unthinkable
for now. Powell was stone-faced during and after the speech,
and the moderates at State were stunned. Most of the top officials
there had not seen the tough language before it was delivered.
Powell had seen it, but he is not a natural infighter, and in
recent weeks he has lost ground on a series of debates with
hard-liners like Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld over Administration policy toward the Middle
East (Powell wanted greater engagement) and treatment of al-Qaeda
detainees at Guantanamo Bay (Powell wanted to be more faithful
to the Geneva Convention). But Bush himself had pushed for linking
the three countries, and Powell appears not to have contested
it. At his morning meeting on Thursday, he told senior staff
members "not to take the edge off" Bush's message.
On Friday at the World Economic Forum in New York City, he stuck
to the party line.
As a phrase, "axis
of evil" is misleading. There is no alliance among the
three countries Bush chose to label. In fact, Iran and Iraq
fought a war from 1980 to 1988 in which a million people died.
Moreover, the connection between weapons of mass destruction
and terrorism is not as straightforward as Bush made it seem.
Administration experts admit that North Korea has been out of
the terrorism business for more than a decade and that it remains
on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism
largely as a form of diplomatic pressure. Iraq's support for
terrorism has centered mainly on groups that attack Iran.
The one area in which the three countries do cooperate is missiles,
and it is there that the true logic of the speech may lie. Iran
financed North Korea's missile program in exchange for shipments
of the finished product. Administration officials claim that
Iraq has bought missile equipment from North Korea, one of the
most prolific of blatant weapons producers. But terrorists have
little interest in missiles--they would rather get their hands
on a small nuclear or biological device that could be smuggled
into the U.S. Critics say Bush blurred the two threats--terrorism
and missile attacks--with an eye to his $200 billion missile-defense
program. Linking the two, says Ivo Daalder of the Brookings
Institution, "gives you a rationale for building missile
defense that terrorism alone does not."
Even if they are not
an axis, Iran, Iraq and North Korea pose real threats. Tehran
may have helped senior Taliban and al-Qaeda members escape from
Afghanistan. All three are trying to obtain nuclear weapons
and have--or have had--chemical and biological weapons stockpiles;
any of them could provide a weapon of mass destruction to a
terrorist if one came shopping. For that reason, the Administration
argues, it must be prepared to act pre-emptively--and put the
bad guys on warning. A senior Administration official says the
message is, "You have a choice. That doesn't mean military
action is imminent, but it does mean the President is serious
about the campaign."
The response from the so-called axis, not surprisingly, was
hostile. Iran's religious leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, joining
Bush in a name-calling standoff, said it is the U.S. that is
"evil." North Korea said the speech was "little
short of declaring war." And Iraq said, "Such threats
do not scare us."
America's closest allies offered a muted response while they
tried to figure out what would come next. But even top Bush
aides could not agree on that. Some said relations with the
axis states would actually be helped by the speech. "We
do have this willingness to engage if North Korea is prepared
to get serious," an official said Friday. But others crowed
that engagement was dead. "How are you going to negotiate
with a member of the axis of evil?" said a Bush hard-liner.
That has been the question for years, as one Administration
after another has tried to deal with the problems posed by Iran,
Iraq and North Korea. All three have at times survived as much
isolation as the rest of the world could muster and still succeeded
in stockpiling their weapons. And while Western diplomacy has
brought somewhat better behavior--increased contact with Iran,
easing of tensions on the Korean peninsula--it has not diminished
each country's fervent search for weapons of mass destruction.
Pentagon brass still wince at the memory of Bill Clinton's 1998
speech warning that the world must come up with "a genuine
solution" to the Saddam problem and "not simply one
that glosses over" it. Bush may not be glossing over the
problem, but a genuine solution will require more than tough
talk.
--With Reporting by John F. Dickerson, Mark Thompson and
Douglas Waller/Washington, Tim Larimer/Tokyo and Azadeh Moaveni/Tehran
