David Frum manages to write a defense of the “axis of evil” line in Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address without accounting for Iraq’s part in the so-called axis. That’s fairly extraordinary, since one of the principal objections to the statement was that it was absurd to describe Iraq and Iran as being on the same side, since everyone in the world understood that Iran and Hussein’s Iraq were bitter enemies. The full statement from the speech also represented the beginning of the Bush administration’s public agitation for war with Iraq:

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. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States.

All of the worst, most misleading features of later pro-war arguments are here. There are the references to Iraq’s past weapons programs, which had since been dismantled, and the baseless hint that Iraq might hand the weapons it wasn’t actually developing to terrorists. Iraq’s sponsorship of international terrorism is likewise exaggerated throughout. There is the fearmongering that deterrence is insufficient, and there is the usual exaggeration of the threat that the administration would later use to build up their case for “preventive” war. Bush was already laying the groundwork for that case when he said this:

We’ll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.

This was yet more irresponsible fearmongering designed to make it seem as if “preventive” war would be necessary. Time was not on our side? That might have seemed plausible to a lot of Americans just four months after the 9/11 attacks, but as we look back on this speech ten years later we can see that this was a massive overreaction. The Iraq war that followed from the ideas outlined in the speech proved to be the worst mistake in U.S. foreign policy in a generation. In retrospect, Bush’s assertions that Iraq was arming itself with unconventional weapons were completely wrong. As we discovered later, Hussein wanted to create the impression of a weapons program to balance Iran, which was the rival state that Bush stupidly lumped together with Iraq in his speech. The “axis of evil” line was part of a larger argument in favor of preventive warfare to halt alleged proliferation by “rogue” states, and this has since been discredited by the invasion of Iraq.