A BOSTON GLOBE EDITORIAL
Bush's evil axis

By 0, 2/3/2002

WHEN THE US president speaks, even if American voters are his primary audience, the rest of the world listens, and listens carefully. Consequently, President Bush committed a gratuitous blunder in his State of the Union address Tuesday night when he lumped together the disparate regimes in North Korea, Iran, and Iraq as ''an axis of evil arming to threaten the peace of the world.''

The least of the errors embedded in this rhetoric was its evocation of America's enemies in World War II: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and imperial Japan. Those three states did form an aggressive axis against the United States and its allies. The contemporary regimes Bush castigated in his State of the Union speech are not allies and have nothing in common with the states ruled by Hitler, Mussolini, and Emperor Hirohito.

Far worse than his mangling of history was Bush's intimation that North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, despite their unmistakable differences, ought to be treated as though they represent three versions of the same threat. In terms that were too simplistic, Bush attempted to describe that threat. ''By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger,'' he said. ''They could provide these arms to terrorists.''

Bush's speech lauded the Pakistani government of General Pervez Musharraf despite the fact that Pakistan also possesses weapons of mass destruction and has been vulnerable to penetration by extremist groups. It is evident that the danger Bush wished to describe emanates not simply from a state becoming a nuclear power but from the conduct and assumed intentions of that state.

In this regard the differences separating North Korea, Iran, and Iraq are far more relevant than the similarity of their quest for weapons of mass destruction. The United States needs to pursue distinct policies toward each of these three nasty actors.

Bush's most obvious error was to revert to a threatening tone for North Korea - as if the moratorium on Pyongyang's missile development and the deal to freeze its nuclear program had never happened. As he had a year ago when South Korea's President Kim Dae Jung visited him in Washington, Bush heedlessly dismissed the gains from that Nobel Peace Prize laureate's policy of dialogue and reconciliation with North Korea.

If Bush seriously intends to have Saddam Hussein removed from power in Iraq, the last thing he should be doing is assisting Saddam in his current charm offensive with Iraq's neighbors, Iran above all. By speaking of those two bitter foes as if both are now equal targets of American wrath, Bush obtusely played into the hands of both Saddam and the Iranian hard-liners. Sounding tough is not the same as acting smart.


This story ran on page C6 of the Boston Globe on 2/3/2002.
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