Factsheet on the "Axis of Evil"

The people who brought you "The Top Five Lies About This War" now bring you
"No Rest for the Wicked: A Factsheet on the 'Axis of Evil.'"  Students in
Solidarity at the University of Pittsburgh has a printable version of this
factsheet on its website at:

http://www.pitt.edu/~leftists/20020316norestforthewicked.pdf

It's intended for a general audience, so it can be one more piece of
information to have at a literature table.  The text of the leaflet is
below, although we strongly encourage you to use the printable PDF version,
because it's already nicely formatted and even has a few interesting
graphics.

John Lacny

**************
http://www.pitt.edu/~leftists/20020316norestforthewicked.pdf

March 16, 2002

No Rest for the Wicked: A Factsheet on the 'Axis of Evil'
by John Lacny

In his State of the Union address George W. Bush referred to North Korea,
Iran, and Iraq as an "axis of evil." The word "axis" was deliberately chosen
to invoke memories of the global fascist conspiracy between Germany, Italy
and Japan to subjugate the world. Do the countries of the contemporary "axis
of evil" merit such a comparison? Let's briefly look at each case.

NORTH KOREA: The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) is in the
midst of recovering from a disastrous famine. Its military expenditures do
not match those of its neighbor to the South, much less the United States,
which still maintains thousands of troops in South Korea. For nearly fifty
years there has been an armistice -- not an official peace treaty! --
between the two Koreas. Since the demise of the military dictatorship in the
South there have been tentative steps towards a peace treaty, and even
serious talk of eventual reunification. Under Clinton the United States was
relatively favorable to these initiatives, but since the Bush takeover the
official US position has been much less conciliatory. In the South there is
rising discontent and mounting protests against the presence of US bases,
and to reasonable people it would seem that the Koreans are best left to
work out their differences peacefully and without outside interference.
Needless to say, Bush's grouping of North Korea with an "axis of evil" does
not help matters in this still-delicate situation.

IRAN: The Islamic Republic of Iran, despite recent attempts by the regime to
polish its image, remains a repressive society where the religious
authorities impose the shari'a law, including public hangings and stoning.
However, the idea that this is a result of Iran's "traditional Islamic
culture" is bogus: by all accounts, the regime is deeply unpopular, although
Bush's recent pronouncements have had the effect of uniting some sectors of
public opinion behind the worst elements of the regime. After World War II
Iran actually had a democratically-elected government, but the CIA helped
engineer a coup in 1953 -- with more than a little help from the political
Islamists (so-called "Islamic fundamentalists") -- that restored the hated
Shah to power.  When the Shah was overthrown in 1979 the political Islamists
imposed their rule over the dead bodies of many advocates of a secular and
democratic society, but in this respect they were little different from
those political Islamists (such as the rulers of Saudi Arabia or the various
mujahidin factions in Afghanistan, including the Taliban up until recently)
who were supported by the United States. And indeed, the current president
of Iran, Mohamed Khatami, is attempting to gain favor with the United
States. It is unclear why Bush chose to castigate Iran at this time, and
Iran would never belong to an "axis" that includes Iraq, since the two
countries fought a bloody war for eight years in which as many as 1.5
million people died.

IRAQ: Since the end of the Gulf war in 1991, the sanctions imposed on Iraq
by the United Nations at the behest of the United States have caused immense
suffering: estimates of deaths, most of them children, are in the hundreds
of thousands. The rationale for the sanctions has changed from year to year:
they were originally imposed in the wake of the invasion of Kuwait; then
they were justified as necessary for forcing Iraq to eliminate its "weapons
of mass destruction"; now US officials say openly that the sanctions will
stay in place until Saddam Hussein is removed from power. In any event,
Iraq's infrastructure and basic social services have been demolished. We are
expected to believe that this country is in a position to wage some sort of
war against the United States. Meanwhile, the rationale for weapons
inspections (assuming they're needed at all, which is debatable since at
least some members of the inspection teams have said that it is unlikely
that Iraq still possesses the capacity to manufacture chemical or other
"weapons of mass destruction") is not very convincing so long as the closest
ally of the United States in the region -- Israel -- is the only country in
the region with nuclear weapons, and since it -- every bit as much as Iraq
-- has a history of aggression against its neighbors and repeated violations
of UN resolutions.

Not only are the members of the "axis of evil" unconnected with one another,
but at least two of them are mortal enemies. And even if one were to add
together the military spending of all three of these countries, along with
the military spending of all of their possible allies, it would not begin to
match that of the United States, a country which in 1999 accounted for 36%
of all military spending worldwide.

Even still, Bush's proposed budget increases military spending by $46
billion to $397 billion. This includes $7.8 billion for the national missile
defense ("Star Wars") program, which will not only exacerbate tensions with
Russia and China but which is useless against missiles -- let alone
individual terrorists wielding box-cutters! There is also $15.6 billion for
nuclear weapons -- after all, the United States government would have you
believe, what country could be better trusted to possess such weapons of
mass destruction than the only country which has ever actually used them?

Meanwhile, Bush's budget accelerates and makes permanent tax cuts for the
wealthy, including steep cuts in corporate taxes, while also cutting job
training programs and instituting an incredible 28% cut in Community
Development funding. As the government gets set to expand the war in
who-knows-what direction, it is the poor and the unemployed who will be
paying more of the costs domestically even as nameless thousands overseas
wil face the aerial bombing and mass death which have become such a sorry
part of the human landscape in the past century.


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"[C]apital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and 
dirt."
--Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 31

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