I would genuinely love to hear a Bush supporter defend this kind of abject stupidity. From a Newsweek article describing how and why U.S.-Iranian relations deteriorated in 2002:
In a pattern that would become familiar, however, a chill quickly followed the warming in relations. Barely a week after the Tokyo meeting, Iran was included with Iraq and North Korea in the “Axis of Evil.” Michael Gerson, now a NEWSWEEK contributor, headed the White House speechwriting shop at the time. He says Iran and North Korea were inserted into Bush’s controversial State of the Union address in order to avoid focusing solely on Iraq. At the time, Bush was already making plans to topple Saddam Hussein, but he wasn’t ready to say so. Gerson says it was Condoleezza Rice, then national-security adviser, who told him which two countries to include along with Iraq. But the phrase also appealed to a president who felt himself thrust into a grand struggle. Senior aides say it reminded him of Ronald Reagan’s ringing denunciations of the “evil empire.”
Once again, Iran’s reformists were knocked back on their heels. “Those who were in favor of a rapprochement with the United States were marginalized,” says Adeli. “The speech somehow exonerated those who had always doubted America’s intentions.”
Examples like these lead me to believe that our worst assumptions about the Bush gang — their breathtaking incompetence, their inability to put policy over politics, their tragic shortsightedness — aren’t nearly harsh enough. In instances like this one, the Bush White House’s stupidity is truly dangerous.
Think about the story here: the president’s chief speechwriter in 2002 fully acknowledged that he and the Secretary of State created the “axis of evil” line as a purely rhetorical exercise. Merit, diplomacy, and common sense were irrelevant.
The State of the Union could have just mentioned Iraq, but that would have made it appear that the administration was focused on an invasion (which, of course, it was). Instead, Gerson and Rice added Iran for purely rhetorical purposes, which in turn, led to a deteriorating relationship.
And all of this was acceptable to the president, of course, because “axis of evil” was reminiscent of “evil empire.” As if that was a good reason to antagonize Iran and utterly destroy promising diplomatic negotiations.
Isaac Chotiner asks, “Iran and North Korea were included [in an Axis of Evil] because of Bushian nostalgia and the desire to make people think war with Iraq wasn’t already a sure thing?” As it turns out, yes, that’s exactly why.
Of course, I’d be remiss if I neglected to mention that, a year later, the Bush gang continued to screw up the relationship with Iran even more.
It would be another war that nudged the two countries together again. At the beginning of 2003, as the Pentagon readied for battle against Iraq, the Americans wanted Tehran’s help in case a flood of refugees headed for the border, or if U.S. pilots were downed inside Iran. After U.S. tanks thundered into Baghdad, those worries eased. “We had the strong hand at that point,” recalls Colin Powell, who was secretary of State at the time. If anything, though, America’s lightning campaign made the Iranians even more eager to deal. Low-level meetings between the two sides had continued even after the Axis of Evil speech. At one of them that spring, Zarif raised the question of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a rabidly anti-Iranian militant group based in Iraq. Iran had detained a number of senior Qaeda operatives after 9/11. Zarif floated the possibility of “reciprocity” — your terrorists for ours.
The idea was brought up at a mid-May meeting between Bush and his chief advisers in the wood-paneled Situation Room in the White House basement. Riding high, Bush seemed to like the idea of a swap, says a participant who asked to remain anonymous because the meeting was classified. Some in the room argued that designating the militants as terrorists had been a mistake, others that they might prove useful against Iran someday. Powell opposed the handover for a different reason: he worried that the captives might be tortured. The vice president, silent through most of the meeting as was his wont, muttered something about “preserving all our options.” (Cheney declined to comment.) The MEK’s status remains unresolved.
Around this time what struck some in the U.S. government as an even more dramatic offer arrived in Washington — a faxed two-page proposal for comprehensive bilateral talks. To the NSC’s Mann, among others, the Iranians seemed willing to discuss, at least, cracking down on Hizbullah and Hamas (or turning them into peaceful political organizations) and “full transparency” on Iran’s nuclear program. In return, the Iranian “aims” in the document called for a “halt in U.S. hostile behavior and rectification of the status of Iran in the U.S. and abolishing sanctions,” as well as pursuit of the MEK.
An Iranian diplomat admits to NEWSWEEK that he had a hand in preparing the proposal, but denies that he was its original author. Asking not to be named because the topic is politically sensitive, he says he got the rough draft from an intermediary with connections at the White House and the State Department. He suggested some relatively minor revisions in ballpoint pen and dispatched the working draft to Tehran, where it was shown to only the top ranks of the regime. “We didn’t want to have an ‘Irangate 2′,” the diplomat says, referring to the secret negotiations to trade weapons for hostages that ended in scandal during Reagan’s administration. After Iran’s National Security Council approved the document (under orders from Khameini), a final copy was produced and sent to Washington, according to the diplomat.
The letter received a mixed reception. Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage were suspicious. Armitage says he thinks the letter represented creative diplomacy by the Swiss ambassador, Tim Guldimann, who was serving as a go-between. “We couldn’t determine what [in the proposal] was the Iranians’ and what was the Swiss ambassador’s,” he says. He added that his impression at the time was that the Iranians “were trying to put too much on the table.” Quizzed about the letter in front of Congress last week, Rice denied ever seeing it. “I don’t care if it originally came from Mars,” Mann says now. “If the Iranians said it was fully vetted and cleared, then it could have been as important as the two-page document” that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger received from Beijing in 1971, indicating Mao Zedong’s interest in opening China.
A few days later bombs tore through three housing complexes in Saudi Arabia and killed 29 people, including seven Americans. Furious administration hard-liners blamed Tehran. Citing telephone intercepts, they claimed the bombings had been ordered by Saif al-Adel, a senior Qaeda leader supposedly imprisoned in Iran. “There’s no question but that there have been and are today senior Al Qaeda leaders in Iran, and they are busy,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld growled. Although there was no evidence the Iranian government knew of Adel’s activities, his presence in the country was enough to undermine those who wanted to reach out.
Powell, for one, thinks Bush simply wasn’t prepared to deal with a regime he thought should not be in power. As secretary of State he met fierce resistance to any diplomatic overtures to Iran and its ally Syria. “My position in the remaining year and a half was that we ought to find ways to restart talks with Iran,” he says of the end of his term. “But there was a reluctance on the part of the president to do that.” The former secretary of State angrily rejects the administration’s characterization of efforts by him and his top aides to deal with Tehran and Damascus as failures. “I don’t like the administration saying, ‘Powell went, Armitage went … and [they] got nothing.’ We got plenty,” he says. “You can’t negotiate when you tell the other side, ‘Give us what a negotiation would produce before the negotiations start’.”
We’ll be paying the consequences of Bush’s presidency for a long time.