The conflict is no longer "just" against terrorism with global reach. Rather, countries unfriendly to America will be prevented -- by war if necessary -- from developing chemical, nuclear or biological warheads and the missiles needed to deliver them. "The civilized world faces unprecedented dangers," the President said, warning that inaction, like appeasement 60 years ago, will lead to disaster.

That the Second World War ended in obliterating nuclear flashes that incinerated tens of thousands of people, and that now an American president is willing to wage war to avert such a catastrophe being visited on an American city, may be an irony lost on Baghdad, Tehran or Pyongyang.

In one sense, Mr. Bush's new strategy simply adds a pre-emptive offensive component to his long-championed National Missile Defence. North Korea, Iran and Iraq all have, or are close to having, long-range missiles. All three are known to be seeking nuclear weapons capability. Iran and Iraq have -- and have used -- chemical weapons.

So, instead of relying solely on a defensive antimissile shield to protect against surprise attacks from "rogue states," as those three countries used to be dubbed, the President has now laid down justification for a pre-emptive war, while stopping well short of any clear ultimatum.

"By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger," Mr. Bush said. "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."

But little except military ambition and visceral antipathy to the United States links the new "axis." Iran, a large, sophisticated and -- compared to the Arab world -- relatively democratic society, is Iraq's bitter rival and sometime enemy. The two fought a brutal eight-year war in the 1980s. Iraq, a secular and brutal police state, has been America's nemesis ever since Saddam Hussein survived the first president Bush's deliberately aborted gulf war. North Korea, where half the population verges on starvation while the bizarre Kim Jong-il, son of reclusive Kim il-Sung, runs a Stalinist regime that is both quixotic and draconian.

Mr. Bush lumps the three together. But each poses a vastly different threat and none seems as easily attackable as the Taliban's Afghanistan, where a regime with no friends and little military strength proved relatively easy prey for a combination of air power, special forces and proxy militias.

Meanwhile, at least one other undemocratic and already nuclear-armed regime, Pakistan, which on Sept. 10 was an isolated pariah state headed by a military ruler, apparently poses no such threat -- simply by virtue of having bowed to Washington's blunt and far-reaching demands in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Equally problematic will be Washington's difficulty in assembling any sort of coalition against North Korea, Iran or Iraq, let alone finding military partners in a conflict.

Iran has lots of friends. Beijing won't stand by if North Korea is attacked. And even Iraq commands far more sympathy in the West and support in the Arab world than the Taliban's Afghanistan.

President Bush "may have put himself in a box because by talking so tough he may have to do something," James Lindsay, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, said yesterday.

While the White House insisted that the President's tough talk wasn't "sending a signal that military action is imminent," and that the Bush administration was still willing to talk to Tehran and Pyongyang (but not Baghdad), the next step remains destabilizing vague.

Ivo Daalder, another senior, foreign policy studies fellow at Brookings, said he believed it was a "colossal mistake" for Mr. Bush to have put Iran and North Korea in the same category as Baghdad, because it forces the administration "into to a highly confrontational policy."

Given the relative speed and ease with which military action toppled the Taliban, and at the same time silenced criticism from both Washington's allies and its traditional rivals, the Bush administration may be hoping that similarly aggressive leadership against tougher adversaries will produce similarly docile support, or at worst, silence, in the future.

At home, the President, who enjoys record high approval ratings, can be sure of broad domestic support for his tough stance, as he has since Sept. 11. Backing for Mr. Bush has extended across the political spectrum.

The President may also believe that rhetoric and sabre-rattling after the military success in Afghanistan will cow (or persuade) at least some of the new triumvirate of evil to dramatically change course -- rather like General Pervez Musharraf's transformation from pariah head of a military government to Washington's newest best friend.

That seems unlikely.

"Little Bush's accusation against Iraq is baseless," Salim al-Qubaisi, head of Iraq's puppet parliament's foreign-relations committee, said yesterday. In Tehran, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said the world wasn't ready to accept American hegemony. And in North Korea, state radio spouted a somewhat more venomous-than-usual denunciation of America.

Still, Washington and Tehran both made efforts in the wake of Sept. 11 to restart a dialogue. That may yet re-emerge. Currently, the Bush administration is in high dudgeon over an alleged Iranian arms shipment to Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority and Tehran's interference in western Afghanistan.

Yet, to dismiss President Bush's grim warning that -- with or without allies, and whether or not the world approves -- America will not risk the calamitous possibility that a rogue state could obliterate a U.S. city as rhetorical sabre-rattling, would be to forget very recent history.

Within hours of the shocking sights of the World Trade Center towers collapsing and entombing thousands of Americans, Mr. Bush told a still reeling country that he would destroy states harbouring terrorist organizations. In Kabul, the Taliban regime didn't take him seriously. Nor, perhaps, did America's friends.

Paul Koring reports on foreign policy and international security issues for The Globe and Mail. He is based in Washington.

© 2002 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc

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