January 23, 2003	Thursday	Ziqa’ad 19, 1423

WASHINGTON: It was a catchy phrase. Perhaps too catchy. A year after President Bush used the State of the Union speech to declare Iraq, Iran and North Korea an “axis of evil,” the phrase has taken on a life of its own. With this year’s address set for Jan. 28 and the United States on the cusp of war with Iraq, the legacy of the “axis of evil” speech weighs heavily on the speech writers and policy-makers hard at work on Bush’s speech.

Even critics agree that the “axis of evil” was a clever piece of rhetoric in explaining the president’s policies to the American people. But as foreign policy, there is wide consensus that it exacerbated the dangers it attempted to contain.

“It was a speech writer’s dream and a policy-maker’s nightmare,” Warren Christopher, secretary of state under President Clinton, said.

The phrase caused immediate controversy. A year later, many experts say it’s clear it also has caused real damage.

“It was harmful both conceptually and operationally,” Graham Allison, government professor and former dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, said. “Conceptually, the ‘axis’ suggested a relationship among the entities that doesn’t exist. More important, operationally, the reaction of the world and the North Korea debacle demonstrates that it was a mistake.”

The “axis of evil” language upped the rhetorical ante significantly. Some believe it played a role in undermining Iran’s moderate leaders and squelching the country’s nascent democracy movement. Many believe it helped provoke North Korea into nuclear confrontation.

The man who half-coined the phrase was speech writer David Frum, who left the White House a few months after Bush used it. In a recent book, Frum said his assignment for the speech last year was to extrapolate from the Sept 11 terror attacks to make a case for “going after Iraq.”

For inspiration, he thought back to Pearl Harbour and pulled a copy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “date that will live in infamy” speech off the shelf. And he found what he was looking for.

“No country on Earth more closely resembled one of the old Axis powers than present-day Iraq,” Frum wrote. “And just as FDR saw in Pearl Harbour a premonition of even more terrible attacks from Nazi Germany, so Sept 11 had delivered an urgent warning of what Saddam Hussein could and almost certainly would do with nuclear and biological weapons.”

The argument was emotional and powerful. As Frum put it, and Bush eventually said it, the lesson they took from Sept 11 was that “the United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”

But Saddam’s Iraq wasn’t an “axis,” which in the popular mind consists of three aligned powers. To fill it in, Frum added two other (to the US) troublesome nuclear wannabes — Iran and North Korea. Frum acknowledged there was no formal alliance among the three, as there had been between Germany, Japan and Italy during World War II, but argued there were still important similarities.

“The Axis powers disliked and distrusted one another,” Frum wrote. “They shared only one thing: resentment of the power of the West and contempt for democracy.”

So the phrase he came up with was “axis of hatred.” He said his boss, chief speech writer Michael Gerson, changed it to “axis of evil” to match the theological language Bush had adopted after the terrorist attacks. The phrase struck a chord — first with Bush, who liked it and made it his own, and also with the president’s supporters and advisers.

But for many others, the analogy was a stretch. No matter how much of a menace Iraq might pose, critics say it was careless and simplistic to lump it together with Iran and North Korea — countries with which it had next to nothing in common.

The leadership is secular in Iraq and religious in Iran, and the two countries — far from being allies — are sworn enemies. As Iran’s leaders appeared to moderate their anti-American stance in recent years and a democracy movement appeared, Iraq grew more repressive and belligerent. North Korea, meanwhile, remains locked in the grip of an anachronistic communist dictatorship and, far from colluding with other nations, may instead be the most isolated country in the entire world.

Richard K. Betts, director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, said it was obvious for a long time before the speech that the Bush administration was focusing on the dangers posed by “rogue nations” to a degree many experts and allies considered excessive.

The speech “lumped together three countries that the people in the administration were already thinking about in the same way,” Betts said. “Everyone knew before that this was the way they thought, but (the speech) did it in a pithy way that made it hard to ignore.”

At least in public, White House officials reject the charge that the speech caused damage. They note that North Korea was pursuing a uranium-based weapons programme in violation of its international commitments long before Bush uttered the “axis of evil” phrase.

“It’s rather impossible to connect those dots,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said earlier this month. “North Korea took the action before the president was even in office.”

Nonetheless, in what could be seen as a tacit acknowledgment of error, White House officials appear to have dropped the phrase from their lexicon. Bush himself has not used it since August.

Dae Sook Suh, a Korea expert at the University of Hawaii, said it would be wrong to lay all blame for the North Korea crisis on Bush’s phraseology. Instead, he said, a crisis was bound to arise during Bush’s tenure because the 1994 agreement freezing North Korea’s nuclear programme was gradually unravelling. What the “axis of evil” speech did — along with other unvarnished language, such as Bush calling North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il a “pygmy” — was accelerate it.

Blunt speech may be admired in the United States, Suh noted, but in Asia it is considered rude, threatening and unseemly, especially for a president. “Bush may be going the right way in policy terms, but I don’t applaud him for using this cowboy language in diplomatic circles,” Suh said.

In retrospect, the “axis of evil” phrase appears to have caused the most damage to relations with North Korea. Joseph Montville, director of the Preventive Diplomacy programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said it is ironic because putting North Korea into the “axis” seems to have been something of an afterthought for the speech writers.

“It was (added) to avoid intensifying the suspicion of Muslim countries that the war on terrorism was a war on Islam,” Montville said.

This year, he said, speech writers and presidential advisers are likely to be more cautious. The country already is fighting a war on terror, threatening another with Iraq and tying to avoid one with North Korea.

“The temptation is to be rhetorically clever. But we can’t afford the emotional satisfaction of using phrases and words that make headlines the next day but cause us problems later because we fail to think about the implications of the language that we use,” Montville said. “A lack of prudence can put you in a box down the road.” —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times