"SZATANSKA OS" Czy moj prezdent zwariowal??

[legionista1]

"SZATANSKA OS"
Czy moj prezdent zwariowal??
Jesli dobrze pamietam ostatnim
byl Hitler, ktory chcial
walczyc z calym swiatem.

The Axis Of Evil.
Is It For Real?

What Bush is really saying when he
talks tough about rogue states

BY MASSIMO CALABRESI

For a moment last week it looked as if George W. Bush
was about to declare war on three enemies at once.

During his State of the Union speech, when the President
asserted that Iran, Iraq and North Korea "constitute an
axis of evil," he fired a shot that had been months in
the making.

Since the fall, Bush had been worrying that
terrorists might get their hands on nuclear, biological
or chemical weapons, and he wanted to warn rogue states
not to help them do it. So in January the Defense
Department drew up an assessment of the danger and
channeled it back to the White House, where two
speechwriters, Michael Gerson and David Frum, came up
with what they thought was the perfect rallying cry.
Bush liked their phrase--"axis of evil"--from the start,
catching the historical reference to the World War II
alliance among Germany, Italy and Japan. So after 11
drafts circulated among his top advisers, he stood
before Congress, the country and the world last Tuesday,
clenched his fist and delivered the line with gusto,
then made a vow. "I will not wait on events while the
dangers gather," he said. "I will not stand by as peril
draws closer and closer. The United States of America
will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to
threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
He drew a rousing cheer from the crowd; but as people
caught their breath, they had to wonder precisely what
Bush had in mind.

As those questions mounted the next day--allies wondered
if Bush was moving toward some sort of unilateral,
pre-emptive strike--the Administration scaled back its
rhetoric. A senior White House official cautioned
reporters not to read too much into the President's
remarks. But on Thursday Bush and his team cranked it up
again. The President warned Iran, Iraq and North Korea
that they are on his "watch list" and that "they better
get their house in order." National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice vowed that the U.S. would "use every
tool at our disposal" to turn back the threat.
If the stop-and-go saber rattling was a sign of
disagreement among senior Bush officials, there was no
doubt that the hard-liners had won again. The "axis of
evil" line was in many ways a repudiation of policies
that the Administration's lonely moderate, Secretary of
State Colin Powell, has championed since the early days
of the current presidency. Powell's first major conflict
with the White House came last year, when he expressed a
desire to continue talks with North Korea begun during
the Clinton years. Bush's rhetoric last week made that
almost unthinkable for now. Powell was stone-faced
during and after the speech, and the moderates at State
were stunned. Most of the top officials there had not
seen the tough language before it was delivered. Powell
had seen it, but he is not a natural infighter, and in
recent weeks he has lost ground on a series of debates
with hard-liners like Vice President Dick Cheney and
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over Administration
policy toward the Middle East (Powell wanted greater
engagement) and treatment of al-Qaeda detainees at
Guantanamo Bay (Powell wanted to be more faithful to the
Geneva Convention). But Bush himself had pushed for
linking the three countries, and Powell appears not to
have contested it. At his morning meeting on Thursday,
he told senior staff members "not to take the edge off"
Bush's message. On Friday at the World Economic Forum in
New York City, he stuck to the party line.

As a phrase, "axis of evil" is misleading. There is no
alliance among the three countries Bush chose to label.
In fact, Iran and Iraq fought a war from 1980 to 1988 in
which a million people died. Moreover, the connection
between weapons of mass destruction and terrorism is not
as straightforward as Bush made it seem. Administration
experts admit that North Korea has been out of the
terrorism business for more than a decade and that it
remains on the State Department's list of state sponsors
of terrorism largely as a form of diplomatic pressure.
Iraq's support for terrorism has centered mainly on
groups that attack Iran.

The one area in which the three countries do cooperate
is missiles, and it is there that the true logic of the
speech may lie. Iran financed North Korea's missile
program in exchange for shipments of the finished
product. Administration officials claim that Iraq has
bought missile equipment from North Korea, one of the
most prolific of blatant weapons producers. But
terrorists have little interest in missiles--they would
rather get their hands on a small nuclear or biological
device that could be smuggled into the U.S. Critics say
Bush blurred the two threats--terrorism and missile
attacks--with an eye to his $200 billion missile-defense
program. Linking the two, says Ivo Daalder of the
Brookings Institution, "gives you a rationale for
building missile defense that terrorism alone does not."
Even if they are not an axis, Iran, Iraq and North Korea
pose real threats. Tehran may have helped senior Taliban
and al-Qaeda members escape from Afghanistan. All three
are trying to obtain nuclear weapons and have--or have
had--chemical and biological weapons stockpiles; any of
them could provide a weapon of mass destruction to a
terrorist if one came shopping. For that reason, the
Administration argues, it must be prepared to act
pre-emptively--and put the bad guys on warning. A senior
Administration official says the message is, "You have a
choice. That doesn't mean military action is imminent,
but it does mean the President is serious about the
campaign."

The response from the so-called axis, not surprisingly,
was hostile. Iran's religious leader, Ayatullah Ali
Khamenei, joining Bush in a name-calling standoff, said
it is the U.S. that is "evil." North Korea said the
speech was "little short of declaring war." And Iraq
said, "Such threats do not scare us."

America's closest allies offered a muted response while
they tried to figure out what would come next. But even
top Bush aides could not agree on that. Some said
relations with the axis states would actually be helped
by the speech. "We do have this willingness to engage if
North Korea is prepared to get serious," an official
said Friday. But others crowed that engagement was dead.
"How are you going to negotiate with a member of the
axis of evil?" said a Bush hard-liner.

That has been the question for years, as one
Administration after another has tried to deal with the
problems posed by Iran, Iraq and North Korea. All three
have at times survived as much isolation as the rest of
the world could muster and still succeeded in
stockpiling their weapons. And while Western diplomacy
has brought somewhat better behavior--increased contact
with Iran, easing of tensions on the Korean
peninsula--it has not diminished each country's fervent
search for weapons of mass destruction. Pentagon brass
still wince at the memory of Bill Clinton's 1998 speech
warning that the world must come up with "a genuine
solution" to the Saddam problem and "not simply one that
glosses over" it. Bush may not be glossing over the
problem, but a genuine solution will require more than
tough talk.

With Reporting by John F. Dickerson, Mark Thompson and
Douglas Waller/Washington, Tim Larimer/Tokyo and Azadeh
Moaveni/Tehran