SEOUL ¨C In his State of the Union address to the Congress in 2002, President George W. Bush famously described Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an ¡°axis of evil.¡± In the years since, however, America has not treated each in the same way. The differences are highly instructive.
Bush and his hard-line advisers believed that only force or ¡°regime change¡± would stop these ¡°rogue¡± states¡¯ terrorism or their programs to acquire ¡°weapons of mass destruction.¡± So, in March 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, resulting in a state of near-constant civil war for over a decade; an ineffectual central government in Baghdad; and now the rise of the Islamic State extremist group.
In Iran, then-President Mohammad Khatami, a political moderate, offered what might have been a reasonable deal to curb the country¡¯s nuclear program. But Bush and his team preferred to pressure Iran with sanctions and military threats, and any hope for a negotiated solution vanished when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad succeeded Khatami in 2005. It was only when another moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, took office in 2013 that hope for a negotiated solution could be revived.
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