White House Spins Out on an Axis of Evil

What a nuisance! Just as the Bush administration had Saddam Hussein back in the cross hairs as the top target of the president's global evil-eradication program comes the news of more urgent threats. And once again, the bad news about Al Qaeda and North Korea could not be logically connected in any way with Iraq.

First, CIA Director George J. Tenet issued a warning that Al Qaeda posed as much of a danger to the U.S. as it did before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. That's a bummer because, if true, it means that the much-celebrated regime change in Afghanistan didn't even slow down Osama bin Laden's gang of psychos. It is then doubly difficult to make the case that a regime change in Iraq would make Americans safer from Al Qaeda terrorism because there is not a shred of reliable evidence linking that to Hussein.

Both Tenet and Czech President Vaclav Havel have said that there is no evidence that a much-publicized Prague meeting between Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi agent ever happened.

Now we learn, according to high-level Bush administration leaks to the New York Times, that Pakistan has been colluding with North Korea to the mutual benefit of their respective nuclear weapons programs. Both countries are in violation of agreed-upon international restraints, but in Pakistan's case the U.S. has lifted sanctions, while it seeks to reimpose them on North Korea.

Further complicating things, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz last week disavowed any Iraqi link to Al Qaeda: "We don't condone religious fundamentalism, and therefore we don't have any relationship with those people." We don't have to trust Aziz to know his and Hussein's secular Baath Party has a huge stake in repressing fundamentalism.

This is an awkward irony, given that our Pakistani and Saudi allies not only condone Muslim fundamentalism but, more important, created its most virulent expression in the form of Bin Laden's sponsors -- the Taliban.

Why not engineer a regime change in North Korea and Pakistan before getting around to Iraq, where functioning nuclear weapons, according to our latest CIA intelligence, are only a gleam in Hussein's eyes? For all the loose talk about Hussein's purported chemical and biological weapons threat -- smallpox vaccine, anyone? -- it is nuclear weapons, combined with the missile delivery systems possessed by North Korea and Pakistan, that represent the most serious threat of mass destruction. If launched on a city like New Delhi or Seoul, even atomic bombs like the primitive ones we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 57 years ago would be an unfathomable atrocity.