| |
One year on: How the 'evil axis' has
fared
By Jeffrey Donovan
WASHINGTON - A year ago, US President George W
Bush surprised the world when he branded Iraq, Iran and
North Korea an axis of evil in his first State of the
Union address to the American people.
On January
28, at the midway point of his first term as president,
Bush will deliver his second State of the Union speech,
which is expected to be a rousing call for possible
military action against Baghdad.
Yet the
reverberations of Bush's axis-of-evil speech are still
being felt in Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
RFE/RL
has asked three analysts to look back and assess the
impact Bush's speech last year and his subsequent
hardline rhetoric have had on developments in his
so-called axis of evil.
James Lindsay is an
analyst with the Brookings Institution, a think tank in
Washington. Lindsay said that while Bush's European
critics, such as the French, blasted the axis of evil
reference as overly simplistic and moralistic, it has
actually forced Europeans to confront what he suggests
is their own hypocrisy regarding their professed belief
in the supremacy of international law and the United
Nations.
Lindsay said that Europeans, who often
urge the United States to defer to the UN as the arbiter
of international disputes, might not approve of Bush's
threats against Iraq. But he said that by threatening to
act unless the UN moves to enforce its own Security
Council resolutions violated by Saddam Hussein, Bush put
his critics on the spot and enabled the return of
weapons inspectors to Iraq.
"It wasn't until
President Bush was willing to say, 'I'm going outside of
the UN to do something about Saddam Hussein' that all of
a sudden America's allies discovered that if you're
going to talk about the rule of law, you've also got to
talk about enforcement," Lindsay said.
But as
for the impact of Bush's axis of evil speech on
developments inside Iraq, Lindsay, like the other two
analysts, agrees that the State of the Union address was
simply one of many signals the White House has sent to
unfriendly foreign governments. As such, its impact,
while resonant, must be viewed within the larger context
of the US administration's overall foreign policy.
Joel S Wit, a former senior US diplomat, was the
main coordinator for the 1994 agreed framework deal with
North Korea, which temporarily resolved a nuclear crisis
with Pyongyang. That deal now appears to be dead after
North Korea's admission last fall that it is pursuing a
secret program to enrich uranium that can be used for
nuclear arms.
Critics of the Bush administration
have said that Bush's State of the Union speech was so
threatening that Pyongyang was forced to take a series
of desperate steps aimed mainly at its
self-preservation: turning its back on the agreed
framework, restarting a banned nuclear reactor capable
of producing material for bombs and, most recently,
withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
But Wit attributed little impact to the axis of
evil speech itself. He called it just another "data
point" that helped persuade the North Koreans that the
Bush administration was not interested in continuing the
policy of engagement and dialogue of the previous
administration of President Bill Clinton.
He
said other data points included US talk of using
preemptive strikes against rogue states, and
specifically naming North Korea as one such state in
discussing the new preemption doctrine last summer.
Wit believes the North Koreans were first
alarmed by the Bush administration in June 2001, when
the White House publicly announced the end of its policy
review, suggesting it would not follow the Clinton
approach. Previously, the Clinton administration would
have communicated its review results first to the North
Koreans. "So I think that gave them a bad feeling. Along
the way, there were other times that they put out
diplomatic feelers, that they wanted to sit down and
talk. And the US wasn't really that responsive. On top
of that, there were other events, like the discussion of
the preemptive attack doctrine and also the review of US
nuclear strategy," Wit said.
However, Lindsay
believes that Bush's axis of evil speech, and his
general hardline approach, did not alone prompt North
Korean leader Kim Jong-il to start enriching uranium.
"Some have gone so far as to allege that this has caused
Pyongyang in particular to act badly. I think what's
notable in the case of North Korea is that they were
enriching uranium since 1997 in violation of an
agreement, so it's not clear that the president's [axis
of evil] speech produced much change in Pyongyang,"
Lindsay said.
What about Tehran? Shireen Hunter
is an Iranian-born analyst at the Center for Strategic
and International affairs, a think tank in Washington.
Hunter believes the axis of evil speech had a more
negative than positive impact in Iran, even if some say
it helped Iranian reformers, since they could blame
religious hard-liners for being thrown by Bush into the
same group as Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il.
Hunter said that in the months prior to Bush's
speech, Iran had taken several steps toward improving
relations with Washington. For one, Iran expressed
sympathy for the September 11 attacks on the United
States. Tehran then stated that it would aid any US
service personnel in need on Iranian territory during
the war in Afghanistan. Then, Hunter said, Iran played a
key role at the Bonn conference that set up
Afghanistan's transitional government.
All of
these things, she said, were praised by senior US
officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell.
And for a brief moment at least, there was talk of a
genuine improvement in US-Iranian relations, a rare
occurrence in the years since the 1979 Islamic
revolution. "After all of this, you come and you [Iran]
get hit by the axis of evil [speech]. I think it really
shocked them. And I think the hardliners said: 'You see,
no matter what you do with the Americans, they are just
against the regime. They want to get rid of it. It's not
your behavior, it's what you are and what you
represent'," Hunter said.
Hunter said the axis
of evil speech, by clearly signaling to Iranian
religious leaders that their existence, and not their
behavior, is the main problem, may have entrenched their
position, at least for the time being.
But she
also compared Bush's phrase and his hardline approach to
former US president Ronald Reagan calling the Soviet
Union an evil empire and threatening to outpace Moscow
in the arms race with a space-based missile-defense
system. "Did really 'Star Wars' and Ronald Reagan bring
the Soviet Union down? My own feeling is that it may
have contributed by exacerbating certain problems, but
the Soviet Union came down because of some very, very
basic flaws," Hunter said.
Today's Iran, she
said, has its own share of very basic flaws, which over
time are likely to produce significant change,
regardless of what a US president has to say.
Copyright (c) 2002, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted
with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC
20036
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
