Axis of Evil
From Metapedia
"Axis of evil" was a term coined by United States President George W. Bush in his State of the Union Address on January 29, 2002 in order to describe governments that he accused of helping terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction. Bush named Iraq, Iran, and North Korea in his speech. Bush's presidency has been marked by this notion as a justification for his War on Terrorism.
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[edit] Definition
Bush's exact statement was as follows:
[Our goal] is to prevent regimes (terrorist) that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction. Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September the 11th. But we know their true nature. North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens.
Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people's hope for freedom.
Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens—leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections—then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.
States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic. George W. Bush 2002 State of the Union Address
[edit] Effect of label
[edit] North Korea
In 1994, the United States and North Korea entered into the "Agreed Framework" with the intention of defusing the North Korean nuclear program. The Agreed Framework succeeded in avoiding immediate conflict but it did not build a lasting peace. The year after Bush's speech, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In 2006, North Korea claimed to have tested a nuclear weapon. American and Russian tests appeared to confirm these claims. On October 3rd, 2007, North Korea agreed to disable its five megawatt reactor, reprocessing plant and nuclear fuel rod fabrication facility by December 31st, 2007; marking significant progress in the six-party disarmament talks.
[edit] Cuba
In a 2006 speech, John Bolton stated "(Cuba) has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort (and has) provided dual-use technology to other rogue states," adding that the threat that Cuba posed to the United States had been "underplayed." The allegation of Cuban WMD capability was particularly strenuously denied by the Cuban government, and disputed by former President Jimmy Carter who visited the country a week later after being briefed by US officials.
[edit] Libya
In 2003 the Libyan government announced its decision to abandon its weapons of mass destruction programs.[1]
[edit] Iran
At the time of George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech, many believed that Iran was in the middle of a reformist movement under elected president Mohammad Khatami. In reality, Khatami had effectively lost his bid for internal reform by 2001, having been outplayed politically by the conservative establishment. Additionally, despite supporting U.S. efforts in Afghanistan to oust the Taliban, the Iranian clerical leadership had publicly declared Operation Enduring Freedom an imperialist plot.[2]
Polling in Iran conducted after the 2002 State of the Union speech declared that the public was essentially evenly split when asked if they felt Bush's statements regarding the regime were accurate.[3]
In 2005, populist candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected the new president of Iran amidst dramatically low turnout, officially closing the door on the reformist movement.
[edit] Origins
[edit] Yossef Bodansky
A decade before the 2002 State of the Union address, in August 1992, the neoconservative and arch-zionist Yossef Bodansky wrote a paper entitled "Tehran, Baghdad & Damascus: The New Axis Pact" [4] while serving as a staffer for a conservative House caucus. Although he did not explicitly apply the epithet evil to his New Axis, Bodansky's axis was otherwise very reminiscent of Frum's axis. Bodansky felt that this new Axis was a very dangerous development. The gist of Bodansky's argument was that Iran, Iraq and Syria had formed a "tripartite alliance" in the wake of Gulf War I, and that this alliance posed an imminent threat that could only be dealt with by invading Iraq a second time and overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
[edit] David Frum
The phrase was attributed to former Bush speechwriter David Frum, originally as the axis of hatred and then evil. Frum explained his rationale for creating the phrase axis of evil in his book The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush. Essentially, the story begins in late December 2001 when head speechwriter Mike Gerson gave Frum the assignment of articulating the case for dislodging the government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in only a few sentences for the upcoming State of the Union address. Frum says he began by rereading President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "date which will live in infamy" speech given on December 8, 1941, after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. While Americans needed no convincing about going to war with Japan, Roosevelt saw the greater threat to the United States coming from Nazi Germany, and he had to make the case for fighting a two-ocean war.
Frum points in his book to a now often-overlooked sentence in Roosevelt's speech which reads in part, "…we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again." Frum interprets Roosevelt's oratory like this: "For FDR, Pearl Harbor was not only an attack—it was a warning of future and worse attacks from another, even more dangerous enemy." Japan, a country with one-tenth of America's industrial capacity, a dependence on imports for all its food, and already engaged in a war with China, was extremely reckless to attack the United States, a recklessness "that made the Axis such a menace to world peace", Frum says. Saddam Hussein's two wars, against Iran and Kuwait, were just as reckless, Frum believed, and therefore presented the same threat to world peace.
In his book Frum relates that the more he compared the Axis powers of World War II to modern "terror states", the more similarities he saw. "The Axis powers disliked and distrusted one another", Frum writes. "Had the Axis somehow won the war, its members would quickly have turned on one another." Iran, Iraq, al-Qaeda, and Hezbollah, despite quarrelling among themselves however, "all resented power of the West and Israel, and they all despised the humane values of democracy." There, Frum saw the connection: "Together, the terror states and the terror organizations formed an axis of hatred against the United States."
Frum tells that he then sent off a memo with the above arguments and also cited some of the atrocities perpetrated by the Iraqi government. He expected his words to be chopped apart and altered beyond recognition, as is the fate of much presidential speechwriting, but his words were ultimately read by Bush nearly verbatim, though Bush changed the term axis of hatred to axis of evil. North Korea was added to the list, he says, because it was attempting to develop nuclear weapons, had a history of reckless aggression, and "needed to feel a stronger hand."[5]
[edit] Development
[edit] Bolton: "Beyond the Axis of Evil"
On May 6, 2002 future United States UN Ambassador John R. Bolton gave a speech entitled "Beyond the Axis of Evil." In it he added three more nations to be grouped with the already mentioned "rogue states": Libya, Syria, and Cuba. The criteria for inclusion in this grouping were: "state sponsors of terrorism that are pursuing or who have the potential to pursue weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or have the capability to do so in violation of their treaty obligations." The speech was widely reported as an expansion of the original axis of evil.
[edit] Rice: Outposts of Tyranny
In January 2005, at the beginning of Bush's second term as President, the incoming Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, made a speech regarding the newly termed outposts of tyranny, a list of six countries deemed most dangerous and anti-American. This included the two remaining Axis members, as well as Cuba, Belarus, Zimbabwe and Myanmar.
