TARGET:
SADDAM: Bush delivering his pivotal State of the Union address
Jan. 29, 2002
The Enemy Is Defined
By James Carney
In late
December 2001, chief presidential speechwriter Mike Gerson made a simple
request whose repercussions would be felt around the world. "Here's an
assignment," he told his colleague David Frum. "Can you sum up in a
sentence or two our best case for going after Iraq?" President Bush had
yet to decide to target Saddam Hussein, but he was moving in that
direction and wanted a rationale for overthrowing Saddam in his State of
the Union address. As Frum wrote later in his book, The Right
Man, "I was to provide a justification for a war."
Frum needed
to explain why Saddam, even if he wasn't involved in 9/11, should be a
target in the war on terror. What linked Saddam with Islamic terrorist
groups, Frum thought, was their hatred of Western democracy. In that
way, they were similar to the Axis powers of World War II. In his memo
to Gerson, Frum called Iraq part of "an axis of hatred," but Iraq was
the only member singled out at that point.
Frum never expected his
stern language to pass the President's lips. But as new drafts were
written, it stayed in the speech. Gerson injected theology into the key
phrase, turning "hatred" into "evil." By mid-January, Bush had decided
that Saddam had to go. Other countries were added to the axis—first
Iran, then North Korea. In the address, Bush declared, "States like
these constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the
world." Frum's simple assignment had given birth to the defining phrase
of a presidency.
TIME Cover
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