Access to and Axis of Evil (North Korea and Ike)

On January 29, 2002, President Bush identified the “Axis of Evil” in his State of the Union speech . It was three and a half months after 9/11 and the President identified three members of the axis, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.  According to the President, these nations “sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction.”

The President promised the following,”We will work closely with our coalition to deny terrorists and their state sponsors the materials, technology, and expertise to make and deliver weapons of mass destruction.”

More than four years later, the North Koreans tested a series of missiles.  In the meantime, Iran elected a regime that was even more confrontational with the United States and prepares to be moving ahead with its plans to enhance its capacity to enrich uranium which may be used in reactors, but also could be used to develop nuclear weapons.  Iraq, on the other hand, is well on its way to democracy.  In fact, U.S. policy has been so effective there that no one has found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq since 2002 or any significant ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.  There is the small matter of all those insurgents, but it seems that they aren’t planting IEDs in the United States yet.  How are we doing with that “Axis of Evil?” and dare I ask exactly what did the administration really do in the last four years about what it identified as its priority?

In the last two or three centuries, war changed.  At one time, a nation’s capacity for war was a direct function of the size of its armies and the quality of its military leadership. Starting sometime between Napoleon and the American Civil War, victory began to depend on industrial prowess.  The country that could keep its factories intact inevitably won the war.  At the end of World War 2 largely because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many began to argue that scientists and engineers would be the key to victory in future wars.  Post-World War 2 conflicts like Vietnam and Afghanistan (against the Soviets) have certainly made the case that there’s more to winning a war than manufacturing and science, but there’s no denying that the latter two will play major roles in the United States’s capacity to maintain military dominance in the world (assuming that’s a desirable thing).  

I know I’m distinctly in the minority, but Ken Lay’s death this morning reminds me that the real axis of evil threatening the United States isn’t necessarily Pyonyang or Tehran. Corporate criminals like Lay are arguably a more serious security threat to this country than missile tests in foreign nations.  Fifty years ago, perhaps because it was the middle of the cold war, the Eisenhower administration sold the completion of the Federal Insterstate Highway system as a defense measure.  Eisenhower, the last president who really had a significant career as a military leader, understood that modern Defense was about “infrastructure”.  The American response to Sputnik with its prospect of Soviet warheads dropping from space wasn’t just to launch our own satellites.  America also responded to Sputnik with a sizeable investment in schools and science and math research and education.

Certainly, under Eisenhower, the American defense establishment expanded and we began a nuclear arms race that remains one of the most terrifying periods in world history.  Still, at the end of Eisenhower’s terms, it was the Democrats who were complaining about a “missile gap” with the Soviets.  Eisenhower himself used his farewell address to warn about the growing link between big industry and the defense establishment, now called the “military-industrial complex”.  This is what that liberal, Ike, had to say about it in that speech,

“Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow. Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.”

It’s worth noting that Eisenhower,who had more direct experience with war than any other American president in the 20th century, was speaking at the height of the Cold War, yet when he identified his “Axis of Evil” suggested that we look within first.  We need to ask the following about the last four and half years.  Have we paid enough attention to our economic and scientific infrastructure to keep our nation’s defensive capacity intact?  Doesn’t preserving democracy and freedom start at home?


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