The president set the theme with the opening sentence of his speech. "As we gather tonight," he said, "our nation is at war." Talk of war dominated the address, with the president promising victory "in this great conflict" at the close of his remarks.
The president expanded his targets but narrowed his policy tools. Reserving his harshest language for Iraq, President Bush said that Iran, Iraq and North Korea "and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world." Significantly, the president no longer requires proof of national links to terrorist groups or to each other, but merely the pursuit of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. "By seeking weapons of mass destruction," he says, "these regimes pose a grave and growing danger."
His strategy made no mention of treaties or diplomacy. It has been reduced to two stark instruments: export controls and military force. "We will work closely with our coalition to deny terrorist and their state sponsors the materials, technology and expertise to make and deliver weapons of mass destruction," he said. "We will develop and deploy effective missile defenses to protect America and our allies from sudden attack. And all nations should know: America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation's security."
This is consistent with the administration's developing non-proliferation policy which harkens back to the approach of the Eisenhower administration fifty years ago, before the key international non-proliferation agreements were negotiated. Then the hope was that proliferation could be contained by agreements among the advanced industrial nations to restrict exports of key technologies and by military action against threatening states when necessary. This strategy failed, but administration officials seem determined to try it again. They reject most of the treaties championed by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton, fearing that they restrict U.S. military options while offering cover for nations cheating on the pacts.
There are serious dangers from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, but there is no indication that the dangers are so imminent as to require a new war. Diplomatic approaches to North Korea, in particular, offer real promise of ending that nation's missile and nuclear programs. While all three nations do have chemical weapons and may have some biological weapons, none have nuclear weapons. The only use of these weapons in the past twenty years came when Iraq and Iran used chemical weapons in their 1981-82 war and Iraqi use of chemical weapons against their own Kurdish population.
The president also draws his circle too narrowly. In the past month the greatest danger that nuclear weapons would be used against innocent civilians came not from terrorists or the three nations he now targets, but from the threat of war between India and Pakistan. While, the United States is not threatened by Israel's weapons, many in the Middle East fear possible Israeli use of its chemical, nuclear and perhaps biological weapons. And these arsenals are cited by some states as justification for their own weapons programs. Export controls and military strikes cannot resolve these problems.
The president and his advisors, flushed with the quick victory in Afghanistan, seemed determined to press for a military solution in Iraq. There may also be a political element in the new strategy. The president's advisors are well aware of the fate of former President Bush. His popularity soared during the 1991 Gulf War but plummeted after. He lost the 1992 election to a relative unknown from Arkansas. The political answer to this problem may be: don't end the war.