Comment; grinding axis.(2002 State of the Union address)(The Talk of the Town)

A political by-product of the modern cult of personal authenticity is a tendency to treat a President's off-the-cuff remarks as more revelatory than the prepared kind. And so they can be. But the prepared kind are a better guide to policy, especially when an Administration is as disciplined as Bush II. No Presidential speech is worked over more obsessively than the annual message on the State of the Union, which every Administration treats as the year's most important guide to policy. And in George W. Bush's first State of the Union address, delivered last Tuesday evening, the most carefully worked-over line was probably this one, which followed hard upon a condemnation of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq: "States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world."

"Axis of evil" is a phrase worth lingering on. By combining allusions to the two great global struggles of living memory, it raises -- rhetorically, at least -- the stakes of the campaign against terrorism. But Bush's evil axis, unlike the Axis powers of the Second World War (the coinage was Mussolini's), is not an alliance. Apart from being three in number and nasty in disposition, North Korea, Iran, and Iraq have little in common with the Germany, Italy, and Japan of 1940; and, apart from an appetite for weapons of mass destruction and a history of dabbling in terrorism, they have little in common with each other. Indeed, the biggest war either Iran or Iraq has ever fought was fought between them.

North Korea is a hermit kingdom ruled by a hereditary Communist monarch. It has no powerful friends and partakes of no worldwide movement. The threat that it presents is almost certainly manageable via a combination of diplomacy and economic inducements, a path that South Korea seems determined to pursue, despite discouragement from Washington. Until now, the Administration has viewed North Korea more as a trope than as a country, seeing it chiefly as an argument for missile defense. Its inclusion in Bush's list seems designed both to buttress that argument, which has little to do with the events of September 11th, and to keep the list from consisting entirely of Islamic countries.

Iran is a special case. It has feisty internal politics and, nominally, an elected government, but the real power lies with a shadowy council of mullahs. (Bush was referring to them when he noted that "an unelected few repress the Iranian people's hope for freedom.") Iran's support for terrorism begins with Hezbollah but does not end there. And yet, for any number of reasons, there is essentially no possibility that the United States would choose to go to war against Iran.

That leaves Iraq, the most hostile and dangerous of the three. The Bush speech, on its face, appeared to be laying the groundwork for a war aimed at toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein and thereby completing a job that the President's father had left unfinished. It is not at all clear, however, how the Administration intends to ...