axis of evil

Bush's "axis of evil" includes Iran, Iraq, and North Korea (darker red).
"Beyond the Axis of Evil" includes Cuba, Libya, and Syria (orange).

The term Axis of evil was used by United States President George W. Bush in his State of the Union Address on January 29, 2002 to describe governments that he accused of sponsoring terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction. Bush named Iraq, Iran, and North Korea in his speech.

Definition

Bush's exact statement was as follows:

[Our goal] is to prevent regimes 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

In 1994 under President Clinton, the United States and North Korea had entered into the "Agreed Framework" to defuse the issue of the North Korean nuclear program. North Korea disregarded this agreement during the Clinton Administration; most experts believe North Korea acquired nuclear weapons before Bush took office.^{[citation needed]} The year after Bush's speech, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Later in 2003, several right-wing political strategists favored by the Bush Administration called for military strikes in North Korea against its nuclear sites.^{[citation needed]} 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 it's five megawatt reactor, reprocessing plant and nuclear fuel rod fabrication facility by December 31st, 2007; marking significant process in U.S.-led multi-lateral disarmament talks.

Origins of the phrase

Shortly after its utterance, 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 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.

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 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."

A decade before the 2002 State of the Union address, in August 1992, the neoconservative pundit Yossef Bodansky wrote a paper entitled "Tehran, Baghdad & Damascus: The New Axis Pact" ^[1] 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.

"Beyond the Axis of Evil" speech

John R. Bolton

On May 6, 2002 the United States, then Under Secretary of State 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. 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.

In 2003 Libya began to make policy changes with the open intention of pursuing a Western-Libyan détente. The Libyan government announced its decision to abandon its weapons of mass destruction programs and pay almost 3 billion US dollars in compensation to the families of Pan Am flight 103 as well as UTA flight 772.^[2] Since 2003 the country has restored normal diplomatic ties with the European Union and the United States and has even coined the catchphrase, The Libya Model, an example intended to show the world what can be achieved through negotiation rather than force when there is goodwill on both sides.

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.

In January 2006, Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz implicated "the axis of terror that operates between Iran and Syria" following a suicide bomb in Tel Aviv.^[3] The phrase axis of terror earned more publicity in April 2006 when Israel's UN Ambassador, Dan Gillerman, cautioned of a new axis of terror — Iran, Syria and the Hamas-run Palestinian government; Gillerman repeated the term before the UN over the crisis in Lebanon.^{[citation needed]} Some three months later Israeli senior foreign ministry official Gideon Meir branded the alleged alliance an axis of terror and hate.^[4]

Criticism of the term

One criticism is that unlike the Axis powers, the three nations mentioned in Bush's speech have not been coordinating public policy, and therefore the term axis is incorrect. Also, while the Axis Powers of World War Two signed diplomatic treaties, such as the Pact of Steel and the Tripartite Pact, with one another that created a military alliance between them, none of the nations that make up the "axis of evil" have taken similar steps.

In addition, Iran and Iraq fought the long, bloody Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, under basically the same leadership as that which existed at the time of Bush's speech leading some to believe the linking between the nations under the same banner as misguided. Others argue that each of the three have some special characteristics which are obscured by grouping them together. Anne Applebaum has written about the debate over North Korea's inclusion in the group.^[5]

Furthermore, other information Bush cited in his state of the union address — primarily dealing with Iraq and its alleged weapons of mass destruction and terror ties — have been labeled false by Senate-appointed committee investigations. Moreover, the bulk of the arguments dealing with the axis of evil members have been shown to be dependent on factually flawed information.^[6]

Other uses

The Economist, May 11, 2006

Among his other speeches, Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi the chief commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran has spoken of a true axis of evil consisting of the United States, Britain and Israel.

By analogy to axis of evil, the term axis of the willing has occasionally been applied to the coalition of the willing (for countries that participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq).

In the science-fiction Star Wars novel Labyrinth of Evil, Supreme Chancellor Palpatine uses the term the Triad of Evil [1] when referring to the planets Felucia, Mygeeto, and Saleucami in an apparent jab at the Bush administration.

The term has also lent itself to various parodies, including axis of weasels (mocking certain countries that did not support USA on Iraq issue), Axis of Eve (a political action group that opposes Bush), axis of medieval (mockingly criticizes the influence that Bush's personal Christian faith has on his political views), asses of evil (a mocking insult against Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld), axles of evil (denouncing sport utility vehicles for their poor fuel efficiency), and several other variations. Serj Tankian, lead singer for the group System of a Down and Tom Morello, guitarist and former guitarist for Audioslave and Rage Against the Machine (respectively) founded a political action group called the Axis of Justice. Andrew Marlatt wrote an extensive parody^[7] for SatireWire, with the rule: "An axis can't have more than three countries." The Economist ran a 2006 (May 13-19) cover headline titled "Axis of Feeble" about the end of the George Bush-Tony Blair partnership.^[8]

Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela, has described "Washington and its allies" as an "axis of evil," in contrast to an "axis of good" comprising Venezuela, Cuba, and Bolivia (all three countries now governed by leftist leaders.)^[9]

In response to the problems Americans of Middle-Eastern descent have in the current climate, a group of comedians have banded together to form the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour. The comedians, Ahmed Ahmed (from Egypt), Maz Jobrani (from Iran), and Aron Kader (whose father is Palestinian), have created a show which currently plays on Comedy Central. They have also included half-Palestinan, half-Italian Dean Obeidallah in some of their acts.

In 2003 the Norwegian record label Kirkelig Kulturverksted published the CD Lullabies from the Axis of Evil containing 14 lullabies from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Palestine, Syria, Afghanistan and Cuba. Every lullaby is presented in its original form sung by women from these countries, and then a western version with interpretations in English.^[10]

In cosmology, the Axis of Evil is the name given to a pattern that is left imprinted on the radiation left behind by the Big Bang.^[11] The controversial pattern itself is an alignment of hot and cold spots in the Cosmic Microwave Background that seemingly defies the standard isotropic model of the Universe. Discovered and named in 2005 by Kate Land and João Magueijo of Imperial College London, the pattern is controversial and disputed amongst scientists, though two independent studies have confirmed its existence.

See also

• Axis of good
• Great Satan
• Holidays in the Axis of Evil
• Outposts of tyranny
• State Sponsors of Terrorism
• Political usages of the term evil
• Rogue states
• Axis of Evil Comedy Tour

References

External links

• 2002 State of the Union Address - President George W. Bush - January 29 2002
• "AXIS OF EVIL" - PBS Online NewsHour - January 30 2002
• "US expands 'axis of evil'" - BBC News - Monday, 6 May 2002, 22:40 GMT 23:40 UK
• "How to defeat the Axis of Evil" - Salon.com - 24 October 2002
• "Is the Axis of Evil Synchronizing its Asymmetric Offensive?" - The Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development - December 20 2002
• "Libya’s fatal blow to axis of evil" - Sunday Herald Online - 21 December 2003
• Axis of Evil Weather.com - Project that displays weather results for the axil of evil, showing a humanistic side of the Axis
• Axis of Evil Comedy Troupe, produced by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee [2].
• Lullabies from the Axis of Evil Recordings of folk tunes by women from the targeted nations, in a production by Erik Hillestad.
• Global Axis of Evil Parody map
• Living in the axis of evil Dossier on life in Teheran published by the Internationalist Review

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