“States like these [Iran, Iraq and North Korea], 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.”

President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, January 29, 2002

In the years since President Bush labeled the “axis of evil”, liberals and Democrats have made much fun out of this “rhetoric” and Mr. Bush’s cowboy foreign policy.

Today, Iran is pursuing atomic weapons and killing its people in the streets. A U.S. navy vessel is tracking a North Korean ship which maybe carrying nuclear materials (perhaps to Iran) and North Korea is threatening nuclear war.

So you objected to the U.S. acting alone on international matters, you wanted America to work in a multi-nation coalition.

Now is the time for your multi-nation diplomacy to pay off.

France has a navy (# 3 worldwide), so do Russia (#4), China (#5), Germany (#7) and Italy (#8).

How about using some of that multi-national magic to get some of those navies to stop, board and inspect ships coming out of North Korea?

Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a defense strategy that suggests that two rational nations, each of which possess the nuclear capability to totally destroy the other, would not start a nuclear war because each is certain it would end with the total destruction of both (and the rest of the world). MAD may have been well named, the United States and the Soviet Union never did engage in a nuclear war.

In the 21st century nuclear weapons age, two of the underlying assumptions of MAD are clearly called into question.

First, are those who possess nuclear weapons rational? Is North Korea’s Kim Jong Il rational? Is Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rational? If Pakistan should fall to the Taliban, will Pakistan’s Taliban leader be rational?

Second, if North Korea, Iran, or some other country sells or gives a nuclear bomb to a terrorist group and that group uses it to attack the United States (or Great Britain, or Israel, etc.) what targets are destroyed in the mutual retaliation? We may suspect North Korea or Iran as providing the bomb, but they would claim innocence and the world would condemn the United States if it launched a nuclear attack on either country without overwhelming public proof. Unlike the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, terrorists do not live in nice near targets (cities).

To paraphrase Klaatu: