Axis of Misinformation

With a flurry of recent news stories involving both investigative journalism, testimony before congress and the issuance of new reports and findings President Bush's 'Axis of Evil' has collapsed like the shoddy house of cards it was.

In his 2002 State of the Union address President Bush labeled North Korea, Iran, and Iraq as an 'Axis of Evil' claiming:

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.

From its very inception the 'Axis of Evil' has at the least been a misnomer. By any accepted definition an axis constitutes an active alliance with coordination of policy and mutual aid and support. Iran and Iraq fought a prolonged and bloody war, and neither have ever been reliably linked to North Korea. These nations hardly form an axis in the traditional sense, but that is beside the point.

President Bush choose to lump these three nations together and assert that they posed a 'grave and growing danger' due to their pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. The Bush Administration claimed that Iraq had or would very soon have these terrible weapons and the ability to use them against the United States and on these pretenses invaded Iraq. In the wake of the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, all of the previously offered evidence has proven to have been either incorrect or completely fabricated. The Administration's claims have turned out to be nothing more than excited rhetoric. For more on the faulty pre-war intelligence on Iraq please see the Iraq Survey Group Report and the wide body of reporting that followed its issuance.

In the past week the evidence against Iran and North Korea has also crumbled, proving to be much less certain than was originally stated by the Bush Administration if not completely incorrect. On Sunday the Los Angeles Times reported on the lack of credibility of evidence that the US has passed on to the International Atomic Energy Agency; "Since 2002, pretty much all the intelligence that's come to us has proved to be wrong," a senior diplomat at the IAEA said. For more on this article please see the previous post.

Today the Washington Post carried a front page article entitled New Doubts On Nuclear Efforts by North Korea. Among other things the Post reports that:

The Bush administration is backing away from its long-held assertions that North Korea has an active clandestine program to enrich uranium, leading some experts to believe that the original U.S. intelligence that started the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions may have been flawed.

The US chief intelligence officer for North Korea, Joesph DeTrani, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, and Former UN inspector David Albright have all recently shed new light on the Administrations earlier claims as to North Korea's weapons capability. DeTrani testified before Congress that confidence is high that North Korea has materials for uranium production that there is only 'mid-confidence' that a program exists. Hill, speaking at a recent conference, said that it was now unclear that North Korea had developed the techniques necessary for an enrichment program. Perhaps most strikingly Albright's current organization, The Institute for Science and International Security, issued a report comparing the pre-war intelligence on Iraq to the intelligence on North Korea, writing 'The analysis about North Korea's program also appears to be flawed.'

Before the US invaded Iraq the Bush Administration claimed to know that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. These accusations, since proven to be false, led the country into the current quagmire in Iraq. Similar Administration claims about North Korea's nuclear programs led to the breakdown of the 1994 agreement, which had North Korea freeze its plutonium production in exchange for fuel oil. With that agreement no longer in place North Korea resumed plutonium production and tested its first nuclear weapon in late 2006.

The Bush Administration has pursued two of the members of its Axis of Evil with faulty information and rhetoric and come to disasterous results, i.e. the current situation in Iraq and North Korea's nuclear armament. Now the Administration has set its sights on Iran, with perhaps not an equal fervor but apparently with equally flawed and false information.

The Axis of Evil existed only in the words and plans of the Bush Administration and its neo-conservative allies. They used false and erroneous intelligence to mislead the American people and when their plans went south they moved on to the next target. With the war-hawks setting their sights on Iran it is important to remember the last two times that the Administration said it knew that someone had weapons of mass destruction and turned out to be wrong. 'Trust us' long ago lost all currency and the Bush Administration is already been shown to offer false information on its next target.

Iraq, North Korea, and Iran were and remain a group of poorly behaved, possibly dangerous regimes. They have certainly failed to live up to their billing as an Axis of Evil.