Mr. Bush's rash words






Friday, February 1, 2002 – Print Edition, Page A14


Quick. How many times has U.S. President George W. Bush used the word "evil" since Sept. 11? Can't recall? No surprise. Mr. Bush and his speechwriters see wickedness lurking in many quarters, and as Tuesday's State of the Union address showed clearly, are unafraid to say so. Equally apparent, if polls are a guide, most American voters are comfortable with Mr. Bush's uncomplicated view of the world, in which the forces of good and evil are locked, cartoon-like, in battle.

But the world is not simple. In our information age, it has probably never been more complex. And confidence in a geopolitical strategy rooted in the United States' undeniable military superiority over the rest of the planet may yet prove severely misplaced. Tuesday's bellicose speech, in which Mr. Bush collectively described Iraq, Iran and North Korea as "an axis of evil," played well at home but set off alarm bells elsewhere, and stirred fury within much of the Muslim world. The concern is not hard to fathom.

It bears repeating that the U.S.-led assault on Afghanistan was eminently justified. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban had shown themselves to be such dangerous, malevolent residents of our global village that they had to be crushed. From the ashes is arising a new Afghanistan that may yet prove viable. Good.

But from the outset, Mr. Bush and his cabinet warned that vanquishing the architects of the Sept. 11 conspiracy was just phase one in the war on terror. Now comes -- what? A multi-pronged military campaign to overthrow the hugely disparate regimes of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, along with a few other undesirables?

Not yet, U.S. administration aides hastily explained as the Bush speech reverberated around the world. The President was not announcing his list of immediate targets, but rather warning rogue states in general -- and those three in particular -- that if they continued to develop weapons of mass destruction they should expect a U.S. military response, in the form of pre-emptive strikes.

Rhetoric like this is not merely counterproductive. (Predictable howls of defiant rage erupted in the state-controlled media of all three countries.) It reinforces the unnerving impression that U.S. foreign policy is being shaped on the fly. Nowhere more so, it seems, than in the case of Iran.

Iraq and North Korea are familiar enough villains. But until a few days ago, Tehran and Washington were thought to have been forging some sort of rapprochement. Not any more. First Washington accused Iran of meddling in Afghanistan. Then came a bombshell in the form of suspicion, possibly well-founded, that Iran had sold a boatload of weapons to Palestinian terrorists. And so now, to its evident shock, Iran finds itself firmly back on the U.S. blacklist, confronting a wounded, angry superpower that seems to have boxed itself in.

The most worrisome thing about a U.S. foreign policy steered by the perception that the world is divided between allies who support the war on terrorism (Russia, Pakistan and Israel, for instance) and those who don't is where it leads. Through the Bush lens, the bad guys have to be told to shape up or look out. But what if there are more bad guys than realized, and what if they don't shape up? Should they all be bombed into submission, as part of some global campaign that lasts indefinitely? Or will a diplomatic approach somehow have to be revived?

It will not be Mr. Bush but his successors in the White House who will likely have to answer that.


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