Talk:Axis of evil

Moved from regular page, 131.220.159.37 wrote: When i first heared about the "Axis of Evil" i could not really fathom it. Did G.W. Bush really put all those he believes to be evil into one big pot? Saddam is a dictator, and one could call him evil. But where is he the same as Kim Chong-il? They and their countries are different in so many ways.

The very term "Axis of evil" is a convenient alias for "People who rub me the wrong way" it seems. If it was a way to judge the relative corruption of gouvernments, then the list would not only be way way longer, but also include some suprise members. All in all, it is a propaganda construct, nothing more. An evocative one, granted. It conjures images of a crusade against the darkness. Funny, why does G.W. Bush always use religious symbols in a country where there is no set state religion?


 * Are you sure there's no state-religion? Look at your dollar-bills and tell me who you Americans trust into. -- TomK32 13:06 18 Mar 2003 (EST)

--- Comments/Observations Re: "On January 30, 2002, the report Proliferation in the "Axis of Evil": North Korea, Iran, and Iraq by Anthony H. Cordesman was published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies."

This report must have been very hastily cut and pasted together because the "documentation", upon cursory browsing through, appears to be no more recent than July 2000 for a report published January 30, 2002, the day after President Bush's speech. There are numerous references to CIA and UNSCOM reports, but no true citations ... often a reference such as "according to a 'whatever month/year' CIA report" .. and many to newspaper articles.

This is also the first document which I have seen with the "Axis of Evil" label, although there may be earlier ones.

Additionally, this report was found in a listing on the CSIS web site, but in substantially finer print than many other titles, and was not as well identified as many other titles.

File under category of "curiouser and curiouser", please.

12/10/03 10:33 (EST) AI

To push a point here -- which is extremely important to the joint issues of weapons of mass destruction and the weapons of mass destruction investigation, the "Axis of Evil" report, if, in fact (as it appears likely) was another rehash of material gleaned from a massive list of reports compiled since at least 1991 by the CSIS, then GW was hand-fed some pretty "antiquated" info from Cordesman and the CSIS ... or, was it simply an "eye-wash" report?

A further read through Shifting Sands of Neoconservative Logic by Jason Vest indicates that Vest came to a similar conclusion about another Cordesman report from the CSIS. Vest wrote:

"To give but one example: Last month, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith - the official essentially responsible for the debacle of post-Hussein Iraq - accepted a report he had hastily commissioned from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on requirements for stabilization of the country. Though the report implicitly condemned Feith's work to date (its lists of things that either haven't been done or need to be done in a radically different manner are damning), you wouldn't know it from The Washington Post's account, which made one passing reference to the report's 'critical' nature and assured readers that the undersecretary had 'embraced' many of the document's findings.

"The Post, and everyone else, also failed to mention that the CSIS paper was essentially a rehash of the pre- and postwar work of the think tank's own Anthony Cordesman, a conservative analyst whose grounded-in-reality assessments have put him at odds with the neoconservatives - as well as the War College's 'Reconstructing Iraq...,' which had been so cavalierly dismissed by my acquaintance in the administration." - "Axis of weevils cast from the mould," Guardian/UK, April 15, 2005:

They are synonymous with American power, conservatism and the projection of military might.

Now the names of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have gained a second, somewhat less formidable connotation: two scientists have named a species of beetle after America's paramount triumvirate.

Quentin Wheeler and Kelly Miller, who had the task of naming 65 newly discovered species of slime-mould beetles, settled on Agathidium bushi, Agathidium cheneyi, and Agathidium rumsfeldi as names for three of them.

It is intended to pay homage to them, said Dr Wheeler, who taught at Cornell University for 24 years and now is the head of entomology at the Natural History Museum in London. "We admire these leaders as fellow citizens who have the courage of their convictions and are willing to do the very difficult and unpopular work of living up to principles of freedom and democracy rather than accepting the expedient or popular," he said.

Go to Crooks and Liars.com for an illustration of the new species.

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