Radio Australia Today Editorial

Could George W. have been right?

31 August 2009

Think back a few years when the then-U.S. president George W. Bush pronounced that North Korea and Iran were two elements in an Axis of Evil.

The world groaned at this most undiplomatic of statements, and with some reason.

Casting insults never brings good results in world affairs. If anything, the statement further estranged North Korea and Iran from the United States at a time when detente would have been much more useful (after all, at the time, January 2002, George Bush was battling public opinion in trying to convince his people about an incursion into Iraq, just over a year away).

Then this morning comes the news that an Australian ship was found to have containers on board that held weapons from North Korea bound for Iran. The ship’s crew apparently didn’t know anything about their explosive cargo. According to the Age paper in Melbourne, the ship’s manifest said that the containers held machinery parts, and the seamen were horrified at the danger they had unwittingly been facing.

We don’t know who put the weapons in the containers, except to say that the containers were loaded on the ship in China, possibly in Shanghai, and that doesn’t help us much.

It’s been nearly eight years since George W. made his famous Axis of Evil statement, and at last, only months after he left office, comes some kind of evidence that there is some kind of weapons relationship between Iran and North Korea, although whether it was a relationship between governments or between private groups is not known yet.

The news that his warning might have had some merit, and that there is a possible relationship between North Korea and Iran, would be of little comfort to George W. Bush, a man who ended his terms of office as one of the unpopular presidents, and who left a chain of wildfires for his successor to clean up.

- Phil