Could it be that in waging war against Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein, President George W. Bush went after the wrong cog in the now infamous "Axis of Evil?
Justification for the invasion of Iraq three and a half years ago was based on the presumption that the Iraqi dictator was in possession of weapons of mass destruction and that he would make no qualms about using them.
The great fear in Washington was that as a supporter of international terrorism, Saddam would either give or sell a nuclear weapon to a rogue state - or even worse - to a terrorist organization, such as Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda.
As it has now been established, Saddam did not have any WMDs, nor did he have any establish links with Al Qaeda. In fact, Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden could not be on more opposite ends of the Arab political spectrum. Saddam's links to terrorism was that he financed attacks by Palestinian extremists against Israel. Saddam had nothing to do with the men who hijacked and piloted three passenger airliners into buildings in the United States.
The real danger it turns out did not come from Iraq, ironically, the one country in the "Axis of Evil" that the United States decided to invade and occupy. Now the US can hardly wait to find a half-decent excuse they can label an exit strategy and get the heck out of Dodge.
Rather, it turns out that the other two cogs - Iran and North Korea - were the ones intending all along to develop nuclear programs, and quite possibly at some point to develop nuclear weapons, either as a deterrent to American hegemony in the region, or to flex their political muscle, or both.
North Korea is one of the few remaining communist countries in the world and possibly the most hermit nation on the planet. Famine in North Korea is an almost yearly occurrence. Although the regime in Pyongyang tries to make the country seem as the last place on earth where there is a worker's Shangri-La, the repressive regime has a hard time feeding its own people. A recent videotape smuggled out of North Korea and shown on CNN depicted people dying in the street of North Korean cities, either from cold, hunger, disease, or possibly all three. Yet Pyongyang is able to divert badly needed funds to invest in nuclear weapons development.
The grave danger emanating from a nuclear-armed North Korea is not so much that that it would deploy its nuclear weapons, its crude devise and certainly limited in numbers would be no match when pitted against the far more sophisticated and immensely larger US arsenal.
Rather, Kim Jong Il, the country's megalomaniac supreme leader, would find it hard to resist a lucrative offer of several million dollars - in hard cash - in exchange for a crude nuclear device, one which could fit in a medium sized suitcase and left to detonate on a street in a Western city. That is the real nightmare.
North Korea's nuclear device, tested in an underground explosion Sunday night, is most likely far from being a sophisticated one. It will require still many more months, if not years, before the communist country can develop the technology to fit its nuclear device inside the cone of a delivery mechanism such as a missile able to cross the Pacific Ocean and target American cities.
The international community, including the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, all of which are nuclear powers - the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, and China - all condemned North Korea for its actions.
In fact, of the three cogs of George Bush's "Axis of Evil," Iraq turned out to be the only one without any weapons of mass destruction. Iran, the other member of this infamous club is well on its way to develop nuclear technology. As a result of Iran's nuclear ambitions, Egypt has already announced its intentions to revive its nuclear program, although Cairo, like Tehran, claims that it is developing the program for energy purposes. Did someone suddenly turn off the Egyptian sun?
The danger for the Middle East and nuclear proliferation is that if one country in the region decides to go nuclear, as Iran has, it will only be a matter of time before other countries in the neighborhood decide to follow suit, as Egypt said it would.
I don't want to sound pessimistic but if you think the Sunni-Shiite rivalry being waged in Iraq is bad now, wait until nuclear weapons are involved.
Claude Salhani is Editor of the Middle East Times. He can be contacted at Claude@metimes.com
Letter from the Editor
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