On January 29, 2002, former President George W. Bush delivered the first State of the Union speech after the 9/11 attacks. He listed three countries that he said were involved in the most nefarious activities destabilizing the world by sponsoring terror and threatening America: 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,” Bush famously told the Congress and the American people 23 years ago. The speech, written by the Republican commentator and the Atlantic staff writer David Frum, went down in history as one of the most notable State of the Union addresses ever delivered.
In 2014, the Washington Post ranked that speech as the fourth “best state of the union ever” for its importance. “Nobody ever remembers much from State of the Union speeches, but one thing they do remember is the ‘axis of evil’ formulation that President Bush brandished in last year’s address to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea,” wrote Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times in 2003.
At the time, it was broadly agreed that Bush was outlining his plans for conducting the Global War on Terror. He publicly sought to incriminate those countries for orchestrating the 9/11 attacks, or at least of being the driving force behind them. With the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iran was almost convinced that it would be the next target.
Rumors circulated among Bush advisors, military commanders, as well as media pundits about plans that the administration was developing to strike Iran. In one case, Gen. Wesley Clark, the former supreme allied commander Europe of NATO, said in September 2003 that a senior military officer in Washington, D.C., had told him Bush was planning to attack six Muslim countries after Iraq, including Iran.
Essays about Iran being the next target mushroomed in mainstream publications, and the threat of military action was never off the table until Bush left office in 2009. James Fallows, a former speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, wrote in the Atlantic in December 2004 that although the question of “will Iran be next” was asked frequently, any military action would eventually bring about a world in which America had to deal with a much more intransigent Iran—one that would race to develop nukes and probably use them.
But when Bush first used the pejorative, did it serve any of the purposes that America wanted? And did the United States intend to go after each party of the axis to supposedly eliminate global terror?
The answer is not an easy yes, though also not a resounding no. Instead, incongruous strategies in dealing with the three nations that Bush had described as the worst enemies of America exposed the degree to which that public policy declaration was inspired by his whims or vendettas.