January 29, 2002: George W. Bush Speaks of "An Axis of Evil"

Bush, flanked by Vice President Dick Cheney (left)

and the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert of Illinois

January 29, 2002: George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, delivers the State of the Union Address before a Joint Session of Congress.

His speech was largely written by David Frum, a Toronto native who had volunteered for candidates of Canada's socialist New Democratic Party, but converted to conservatism after reading The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1973 account of the Soviet Union's prison system. He got degrees from Yale, then a law degree from Harvard, and worked for conservative publications: The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and The Weekly Standard. The last of these got the attention of the incoming Bush Administration, which hired Frum as a speechwriter.

The night of the speech, it had been a little more than 4 months after the 9/11 attacks, and a few months since the Administration announced that the man who ordered them, Osama bin Laden, was "surrounded" in the mountains of Afghanistan. And then... nothing. No mention of killing him. No mention of an arrest of him. No mention of progress on catching him. Nothing.

Oh yeah: The economy was in recession. The financial hit the country took as a result of the attack didn't help, but the cause was Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.

Bush began the speech by saying:

Thank you very much. Mr. Speaker, Vice President Cheney, members of Congress, distinguished guests, fellow citizens: As we gather tonight, our nation is at war, our economy is in recession, and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers. Yet the state of our Union has never been stronger. 

Not the dumbest thing Bush had ever said, but not smart. Not a flat-out lie, because deciding how strong the nation is at a given time is a matter of opinion, but an opinion that the facts simply did not support.

Bush welcomed special guests, including the restored President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai; and Shannon Spann, widow of CIA officer Michael Spann, who had been killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan.

The speech lasted 48 minutes. Not once in it did Bush mention Osama bin Laden by name, or mention bin Laden's terrorist group, al-Qaeda. He did mention Iraq, Iran, and North Korea:

Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction. Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September the 11th.  But we know their true nature. North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens.

Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people's hope for freedom.

In both of these cases, Bush was telling the truth. However, neither nation then represented what the early 20th Century Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes would have called "a clear and present danger" to America.

But Bush brought a 3rd nation into the mix:

Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens -- leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections -- then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.

That last line was correct: America did need to keep its eyes on North Korea, Iran and Iraq. However, as we later found out, Bush was lying: Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, nor were they about to develop them anytime soon. Their dictator, President Saddam Hussein, had used poison gas on his own people, but it was all used up.

Having let bin Laden slip away, Bush wanted to change the subject before people realized that. So he tried to refocus America's attention to those 3 countries, and in particular to Iraq, to set up the war he was going to launch.

We eventually found out the truth: On January 27, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney convened a meeting in the Old Executive Office Building, next-door to the White House, to discuss how a war with Iraq could be waged. Why? Not to stop their possession, or development, of WMDs, but to take its oil. Cheney had been an executive with energy company Halliburton, and he was still trying to make money for it, and saw a golden opportunity.

But first, he had to get into the White House. And he knew that his own candidacy wouldn't have a chance, despite having been Secretary of Defense under Bush's father, and House Minority Whip before that, and White House Chief of Staff even earlier, under President Gerald Ford. So he put together a group of business lords and evangelical leaders who bankrolled Bush, one thing led to another, and there they were. Now, as "the power behind the throne" -- or to use the Wizard of Oz analogy, "the man behind the curtain" -- he had the power, but not the responsibility.

In hindsight, the real axis of evil was on that podium: Bush, flanked by Cheney and the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert of Illinois, who would later be imprisoned for child molestation.

Frum left the White House shortly thereafter that speech, joining the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, supporting the Iraq War. He was fired in 2010, because he criticized the intensity of the AEI's opposition to Obamacare. He began to turn away from the right wing, writing for The Atlantic, and supporting Hillary Clinton for President in 2016. (UPDATE: In 2024, disgusted with the return to the Presidency of Donald Trump, he officially left the Republican Party.)

In 2002, George W. Bush said Iran, Iraq and North Korea were "an axis of evil." It was a lie.

Weeks later, he said of President Vladimir Putin of Russia, "I looked in his eyes, and got a sense of his soul. He's a good man."

Many years later, Donald Trump praised Putin and North Korea's leader. (UPDATE: In 2026, Trump launched a war against Iran. Gulf War II was a disaster, now, here was Gulf War III.)

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January 29, 2002 was a Tuesday, as the State of the Union Address usually is. (Sometimes, it's a Wednesday.) Baseball was out of season. The NFL was between its Conference Championship Games and the Super Bowl. There were 11 games in the NBA:

* The New York Knicks beat the Philadelphia 76ers, 78-71 at Madison Square Garden.

 * The Detroit Pistons beat the Washington Wizards, 89-86 at the MCI Center (now the Capital One Arena) in Washington. Michael Jordan scored 32.

* The Los Angeles Lakers beat the Atlanta Hawks, 127-93 at the Philips Arena (now the State Farm Arena) in Atlanta. Kobe Bryant scored 32 points.

* The Cleveland Cavaliers beat the Minnesota Timberwolves, 114-81 at the Gund Arena (now the Rocket Arena) in Cleveland.

* The Milwaukee Bucks beat the Boston Celtics, 109-90 at the Bradley Center in Milwaukee.

* The Los Angeles Clippers  beat the Dallas Mavericks, 117-100 at the American Airlines Center in Dallas.

* The Houston Rockets beat the Golden State Warriors, 100-96 in overtime at at The Summit in Houston. It's now the Central Campus of televangelist Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church. Steve Francis had 33 points.

* The Charlotte Hornets beat the San Antonio Spurs, 78-73 at the Alamodome in San Antonio.

* The Miami Heat beat the Denver Nuggets, 100-94 in overtime at the Pepsi Center (now the Ball Arena) in Denver. Eddie Jones scored 37 for the Heat.

* The Phoenix Suns beat the Chicago Bulls, 91-90 at the America West Arena in Phoenix.

* The Portland Trail Blazers beat their arch-rivals, the Seattle SuperSonics, 92-86 at the KeyArena in Seattle.

And there were 4 games in the NHL:

* The New Jersey Devils beat the New York Islanders, 3-1 at the Nassau Coliseum.

* The Philadelphia Flyers beat their arch-rivals, the Pittsburgh Penguins, 3-2 at the First Union Center (now the Xfinity Mobile Center) in Philadelphia. Marty Murray scored the winning goal with 3:13 left in overtime.

* The Buffalo Sabres and the Carolina Hurricanes played to a tie, 2-2 at the Raleigh Sports and Entertainment Center (now the Lenovo Center) in Raleigh, North Carolina.

* And the Toronto Maple Leafs beat the San Jose Sharks, 4-3 at the Air Canada Centre (now the Scotiabank Arena) in Toronto.