On January 29, 2002, President Bush in his State of Union speech first coined the term of "Axis of Evil" in order to describe governments that he accused of helping terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction. President Bush named Iran, Iraq and North Korea in his speech to constituent the Axis of Evil. Since then, this term has been criticised, ridiculed and joked by a wide spectrum of political powers, domestic and foreign. Probably, of all the foreign powers, Isreal is the only nation that sided with President Bush.
Unfortunately, all the criticism has focused on the susperficial facts that these three nations are not coordinated, not categorized and above all, factlessness.
Well, look at today, merely 7 years since that famous speech, the world finds itself facing the biggest challenges so far. Iran has been rushlessly cracking down armless citizens seeking truth of the latest tinted president election and utilizing all conceivable ways to lay the blame on the outside world; N. Korea, has conducted three times of nuke test and launched numerous short-range missles and now declared any action by the US acting in accordance of the UN resolution will be a declaration of war and has threatened to launched a long-range missle with the possibility of reaching Hawaii. The more evil is the recent speech by a N. Korean official that the People's Democratical Repubic would wipe the US off the map.
Had President Bush delivered that speech today, I would not think anybody would laugh at the term now. After all, everything those two nations doing is no more but evil. Simple as that.
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Excerpt of Bush's speech:
Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September the 11th. But we know their true nature. North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people's hope for freedom. Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens—leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections—then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world. States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.