NEW YORK, Feb. 19 — Three weeks after the “axis of evil” became Bush administration shorthand for Iran, Iraq and North Korea, American diplomats are defending the statement against charges that the United States is trying to use its anti-terror war to settle scores and provide a political springboard to fund its national missile defense system. The administration stands by its contention that all three of these states possess missiles that are a threat to national security. Yet new intelligence assessments indicate that none has deployed any missile that could hit the United States, and will not have one for a decade or more.
Bush's radical shift in military policy
For a generation, the massive US arsenal has been managed with the purpose of not being used. With the exceptions of the Gulf War and the NATO air war against Serbia, this purpose was achieved. It was rooted in the post-Vietnam assumption that war is a last resort, to be avoided if possible.
Now, a radically different assumption is undergirding American purpose, a repudiation of the experience of the last 55 years. With putative battlefields around the globe, war is all at once being defined as the essence of who we are, and nothing makes this clearer than the new Pentagon budget.
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