When George W. Bush made his first State of the Union Address “Speech to the Nation” in Jan­u­ary 2002, he deployed the expres­sion “axis of evil”. Thanks to his own for­eign pol­i­cy, Bush helped bring his own night­mare to life.

Axis of Evil
Axis of Evil, door Mark Alan Sta­maty
But the president’s biggest act of axis-enhance­ment was tying up our mil­i­tary in Iraq and antag­o­niz­ing our allies. While the glob­al cop was busy in Bagh­dad, the world’s oth­er worst vil­lains staged a jail­break. They under­stood that Bush couldn’t read­i­ly respond to their provo­ca­tions with force. The oppor­tu­ni­ty cost of occu­py­ing Iraq has also been felt in Syr­ia and Sudan, among the oth­er places where evil has gone unchecked for want of effec­tive Amer­i­can lead­er­ship. At anoth­er lev­el, our Bush- and Iraq-inspired unpop­u­lar­i­ty has spurred an infor­mal new post-Cold War anti-Amer­i­can Inter­na­tion­al, with Hugo Chávez, Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad, and George Gal­loway run­ning for Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary.

The administration’s dis­cred­it­ed claims about Iraqi weapons have also served Iran and North Korea by cast­ing Bush as the Boy Who Cried WMD. Though there has nev­er been much doubt about their nuclear ambi­tions, pro­pa­gan­dists and apol­o­gists for those regimes have found it all too easy to call the administration’s cred­i­bil­i­ty on the sub­ject into ques­tion and to cre­ate a shad­ow of doubt. Mean­while, Bush’s uni­lat­er­al­ism and the bad taste left in everyone’s mouth by the rush to war in Iraq frac­tured an inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty that might oth­er­wise be much more uni­fied in its response.

Gepubliceerd door Stijn Vogels

Natural born probleemoplosser met een oog voor usability, design, trends en details. Professioneel bezig met letterwoorden als SEO, SEA, SMO, DIY en CYA.

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