Bush's 'Axis of Evil' Rhetoric Meets Reality

US Policy on 'Axis of Evil' Suffers Spate of Setbacks
By Peter Baker and Dafna Linzer
The Washington Post
Wednesday 17 August 2005


President Bush's campaign against what he once termed the "axis of evil"
has suffered reverses on all three fronts in recent days that underscore the
profound challenges confronting him 3 1/2 years after he vowed to take
action.

First, multilateral talks orchestrated by the United States to pressure
North Korea to give up nuclear weapons adjourned last week after 13 days
without agreement. Then Iran restarted its program to convert uranium, in
defiance of the United States and Europe. Finally, negotiators in Iraq
failed to draft a new constitution by Monday's deadline amid an unrelenting
guerrilla war against US forces.

None of these developments may be fatal to Bush's policy goals, but the
quick succession of setbacks has left his national security team privately
discouraged and searching for answers. Whereas Bush in his first term vowed
to reinvent foreign policy with a new doctrine of military preemption to
deal with rogue states, he has largely dropped such talk since the invasion
of Iraq in 2003. Instead, he has favored diplomacy with Tehran and Pyongyang
and nation-building with Baghdad - yet the old-fashioned improvisation has
yielded similarly murky results.

Administration officials publicly have put the best face on the
situation, finding hope in the fact that Iraq's sectarian leaders remain at
the negotiating table and that neither Iran nor North Korea has ruled out
further talks. Unlike in Iraq two years ago, US officials note, this time
they are working more or less in tandem with European and Asian allies.

"These are difficult issues," national security adviser Stephen J.
Hadley said in an interview last week after the Iran and North Korea
setbacks. "They're going to take some time. But the main thing is to keep
the international community focused."

Iran's new hard-line president has said he has ideas to discuss with
European Union powers Britain, Germany and France - the "EU Three" nations
that have taken the lead in dealing with Tehran - and his new national
security chief said yesterday that negotiations will continue. The six-party
talks involving North Korea and the United States along with China, Japan,
South Korea and Russia are due to resume in Beijing the week of Aug. 29.

Seeking cause for optimism, Hadley noted that the latest round of talks
on North Korea ended a 13-month boycott by Pyongyang. "They were basically
testing us to see if they could split the [other] five . . . and they
failed," Hadley said. "Similarly now, the Iranians are trying to test the EU
Three to see if they can split them."

Yet in the broader picture, the fitful pace of talks in both cases
belies the urgency Bush has expressed in the past, and some Bush supporters
believe the time has come for a more robust approach.

"The present course cannot be followed forever," said David Frum, a
former Bush speechwriter who helped coin the "axis of evil" phrase in the
2002 State of the Union address to target countries believed to be
developing weapons of mass destruction. "The president made his statement -
that he will not permit that - so now he has to find a course of action. In
Iraq, the president said he will see the job through. The job's not through,
and we'll see if he'll follow through on that."

Frum said he sometimes worries that Bush has become a captive of a
status quo bureaucracy. "The Bush administration since 9/11 has been again
and again fighting to escape gravity, fighting to escape the weight of the
way things have always been done," he said. "Things are now coming to a
decision point, and we'll know soon."

The unexpected difficulties endured in Iraq since the fall of Saddam
Hussein in April 2003 have colored the broader efforts against the "axis of
evil" states. Tehran and Pyongyang have felt freer to flout American
pressure, secure in the knowledge that the US military is tied down in Iraq,
analysts said.

"The situation in Iraq is sufficiently sober [that] I think this has
given the Iranians a boost of confidence that they didn't have two years
ago," said Geoffrey Kemp, a Reagan administration national security official
who is now a scholar at the Nixon Center. "They're not scared of us as they
once were."

In the interval, North Korea by its own account has built several
nuclear devices. How much progress Iran may have made, if any, is less
clear. Iran denies pursuing weapons, though in the past it hid nuclear
development efforts that it attributed to civilian purposes. A recent US
intelligence estimate concluded that the theocratic state is as long as 10
years away from making the key ingredient for nuclear weapons.

One US official who specializes in nuclear issues laughed when asked to
score the administration's success in handling the three countries. "I'm
tempted to say we're 1-2," he said, "but I think that wouldn't be honest."

Robert J. Einhorn, a former assistant secretary of state for
nonproliferation, said North Korea and Iran "show the difficulty in stopping
determined proliferators without using force." He added: "We are not
prepared to use military options in either place, but we also have not come
up with a combination of incentives and disincentives to get the job done."

After the saber-rattling rhetoric of the first term, Kemp credits the
new Bush team with being "remarkably restrained" on North Korea and Iran.
"At least now we're seen as a cooperative multilateral player and not
thumbing our nose at the rest of the world," he said.

Yet by seeking international consensus, Bush has made his policy
dependent on other countries in a way he has been loath to do. The
administration was blindsided by recent South Korean comments supporting
civilian nuclear energy for the North. And the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) last week adopted only a mild resolution calling on Iran to
turn off its uranium-conversion facility, with no threat of consequences.

"Obviously, Iran is ahead for the moment and they had a much better
week," one disappointed senior European official said. "But I don't think
anybody on our side would say we've lost this yet."

US officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of
sensitive diplomacy, said they still could win a consensus to refer the
matter to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions.

But the outcome of last week's IAEA meeting "just shows how much more
capital we have to put into this," one official said. The official said the
issue, while a high priority, has been overshadowed within the
administration. "There are a limited number of hours in the day and people
are devoting those to the debacle in Iraq."

For all the focus on Iraq, the problems there are even more complex. The
administration has tried without success to pressure fractious Iraqi leaders
to write a governing document. The deadlock led Iraqis to extend their
deadline to Monday, as US officials scramble to help find a consensus.

>From the beginning, the White House has said it would employ different
strategies for each member of the axis. In the case of North Korea, it has
refused one-on-one negotiations but agreed to sit down with Pyongyang's
representatives in the context of multiparty talks. Bush refuses to talk
with Iran at all, although he has supported the European outreach to Tehran.
Some Republicans in Congress are starting to quietly urge the administration
to communicate with Iran directly, as it has with North Korea.

The disparity in strategies has grown more evident. At a news conference
last week, Bush was asked why it might be acceptable for Iran to develop
civilian nuclear power but not North Korea. Bush suggested that Tehran has
been more honest.

"North Korea is in a different situation," he said, because "they didn't
tell the truth when it came to their enrichment programs." The statement was
a striking shift in tone for a president who has regularly accused Iran of
hiding weapons programs.

As the conflict drags on, some analysts predict that resolution will
elude the president who vowed not to wait nearly a full term ago.

"I think in five years we'll be in the same stalemate we are now at
best," said Clifford Kupchan, who studies Iran at the Eurasia Group.
"Neither Pyongyang nor Tehran wants to pick a fight with the 800-pound
gorilla because they'll lose. On the other hand, the 800-pound gorilla
doesn't have a lot of options right now, either."
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/081705Y.shtml


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