LONDON: In order to get beaten up by the United States, a country has to be two things: a “rogue state” and a possessor (or potential possessor) of “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs).

So who qualifies? Let’s start with WMDs. The US government generally defines them as “nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons”. Lots of countries have some: either openly, such as Britain, France, Russia and China; or more shiftily, such as Pakistan, India and Israel.

The nation with the world’s biggest arsenal of WMDs is, of course, the US. But that’s beside the point, as the US is not going to attack itself. More to the point is whether the customary definition of WMDs is satisfactory in the first place, because nuclear, chemical and biological weapons are not the only ones that can cause vast destruction.

Take the American “Daisy Cutter” bomb, which causes an explosion almost as impressive as that of a nuclear weapon. Television pictures of the US bombardment of Afghanistan last November showed a huge, red mushroom cloud with flames reaching 300 metres (980ft) into the air - that was a Daisy Cutter doing its stuff near Kabul. It uses explosives similar to those in the bomb detonated in Oklahoma City, but is six times more powerful. Its blast flattens everything within 600 metres (1,970ft), which would seem very much like “mass destruction” in the middle of a city. In fact, even airliners flown by suicide hijackers can become WMDs, as Sept 11 showed.

Accordingly, the FBI has broadened its definition of WMDs to say that “though typically associated with nuclear/radiological, chemical or biological agents, (they) may also take the form of explosives, such as in the bombing of the Alfred P Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City.”

So Timothy McVeigh’s bomb has officially become a WMD, as presumably would any other device that killed lots of people. “A weapon crosses the WMD threshold when the consequences of its release overwhelm local responders,” says the FBI. That means that every country in the world must have one.

What, then, is a “rogue state”? It is easy to tell what isn’t one: a country, such as Britain, that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the US and always does as it is asked. But in respect of countries that are hostile and difficult to deal with, America struggles uncomfortably for a convincing definition.

“Rogue state” was popular with the Clinton presidency in the 1990s, mainly to justify its desire for a hugely costly nuclear defence shield following the collapse of its traditional enemy, the Soviet bloc. The external threat now had to be presented by hostile little countries that were developing nuclear weapons and would not be deterred from using them by either international obligation or ordinary decency.

To be called a “rogue” by Washington, a country had to be branded not only with a taste for WMDs, but also with lawlessness, support for terrorism and vocal opposition to the US. Even these criteria were not rigid, however - a country such as Syria that generally met them was nevertheless not described as a “rogue state” because of its strategic importance. And North Korea, with which the US was trying to do business at the time, got so angry with the label that the term was dropped altogether and replaced with an even sillier one: “state of concern”.

The then secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, explained: “We are now calling these states ‘states of concern’, because we are concerned about their support for terrorist activities, their development of missiles, their desire to disrupt the international system.”

But Sept 11 brought a new escalation of US rhetoric that raised North Korea into a much worse category than roguery - that of an “axis of evil”. Even the “axis of evil”, however, doesn’t seem to be holding. Since North Korea responded by calling President Bush a “confrontational maniac”, he seems to have dropped the phrase.

As for “rogue state”, the term remains popular with the American press, if no longer with the administration. This month, the New York Times ran an editorial headlined “America as Nuclear Rogue” following a Pentagon planning paper that proposed pre-emptive US nuclear strikes against a list of non-nuclear powers. If any other country did that, it said, “Washington would rightly label that nation a dangerous rogue state”.

So what useful purpose do these ill-defined phrases serve? They certainly haven’t helped the US to capture Osama bin Laden.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.