That Axis of Evil

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.

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.