Today the Axis of Evil was invented.
Iran, Iraq, and North Korea had little to nothing in common when they were featured together on this day in 2002 in President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address as the “Axis of Evil.” Iran was a theocracy busy funding terrorists in and around Israel. Iraq was a dictatorship penned in by severe UN sanctions after its failed attempt to steal Kuwait’s oil. North Korea was a kleptocracy in which a good number of people starved to death every year so the ruling elite could enjoy electricity. There was no evidence that they had any collaborative dealings with one another, or that any such conversations would succeed if they’d tried. There was no axis upon which their evil rotated.
The term had been coined by speechwriter David Frum, who’d been tasked by the Bush administration to come up with “a few lines” to explain why the US might need to go to war with Iraq (we invaded it about a year later). He borrowed the axis idea from President Franklin Roosevelt, whose speech the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had made the compelling case for going to war (some would say the attack had already done that). The Axis powers back then were Germany, Italy, and Japan, which had signed a Tripartite Pact in 1940 to share and coordinate military resources; “axis” was how they described their cooperation. Conversely, Iran and Iraq had spent most of the 1980s at war with one another (by which millions died and both economies were shattered). Later in 2002, an Undersecretary of State expanded the President’s label to include Libya, Syria, and Cuba, and then the Secretary of State added Belarus, Zimbabwe, and Myanmar in 2005.
Lists make patterns and words that follow one another have connections on a page, but no amount of repeating them makes them real.
