Iran, Iraq, North Korea, What Now?

Seven-and-a-half years ago, in his 2002 State of the Union address, then-President George W. Bush declared that the regimes of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea constituted an "axis of evil." He thereby put the United States on a war footing with them. In rhetorical terms, Bush's use of the phrase was highly successful: It was repeated endlessly by the media. But in operational terms, the consequences were tragic. The phrase helped Bush gather support for an invasion of Iraq that wiped out the evil of Saddam Hussein's tyranny, but replaced it with the far worse evil of anarchy, killing perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and 4,000 Americans in the process. Moreover, the phrase alienated Iran’s leadership, with whom, following our invasion of Iraq, we might have had a functional rapprochement, since Iraq is Iran's own nemesis. Finally, the phrase led to an ineffectual policy of not talking to North Korea, a route that led nowhere. Having accomplished nothing by its failure to engage, America (still under Bush) returned to the negotiating table five years later. And by then Kim Jong Il was that much further along in developing his nuclear bomb.