The most important words spoken on Inauguration Day were not President George W. Bush's impassioned call for an end to tyranny.

They were Vice President Dick Cheney's back-handed warning to Iran to desist with its nuclear-weapons program or face possible attack by Israel.

Cheney made the comments during a folksy radio interview on the Don Imus show, in answer to a pointed question. He couched the warning in the idea that Israel might not be restrainable if it thought Iran had acquired "significant nuclear capability."

Yet it cannot be in doubt that Bush's poetically phrased exposition on America's worldwide fight for freedom was intentionally paired with hard-knuckle warnings from his top national security aides to specific "outposts of tyranny."

Secretary of State-designee Condoleezza Rice listed them at her confirmation hearings, and not in answer to a question: Cuba, Myanmar (Burma), North Korea, Iran, Belarus and Zimbabwe.

And that is both dangerous and in denial about the enduring trouble that our "axis of evil" wrought. Why add to the strains on our military and budget by starting another Cold War, this time premised not on an "ism" but a subjective assessment of which nations are "good" and which are not?

We do more than sacrifice the terrorism war if we label Pakistan the enemy because it's under a military dictator with a poor human rights record. That doesn't just end the hunt for Osama bin Laden. If we walk away from strongman Pervez Musharraf, we doom Pakistan to a civil war with Osama-allied extremists in which the nation's nuclear bomb will be the sought-after prize.

And what about bad democracies - and bad insurgencies? This rating system of freedom and democracy has a big downside.

In the Balkans, U.S. officials secretly armed and trained "friendly" forces for offensives against "murderous" Serbs and hastened the Serbs' defeat, but at a price. Our proxy forces murdered unarmed villagers and effectively wiped whole towns clean of Serb inhabitants. In Bosnia, a secret Iranian-arms-to-Muslims pipeline greased by tacit U.S. approval left an overhang of mujahedeen with al-Qaida connections - a 1990s version of the Afghan muj that birthed bin Laden.

The murderer who planned journalist Danny Pearl's beheading in Pakistan was recruited to al-Qaida in Bosnia. The Saudi beheader of U.S. contractor Paul Johnson learned his grisly trade in Bosnia.

Presidential inaugural addresses are supposed to soar. They're supposed to call forth those ideals that unite us as a nation.

Yet Bush took the very issue that most strongly binds us - our willingness to defend our freedoms with our lives - and cheapened it by summoning the nation for a fool's fight.

In one sense, the president is on to something. America's image does need to be burnished. How better to do that than by putting us on record as engaged in a disinterested, noncoercive struggle around the world for the innate rights with which each of us was endowed at birth?

Over the past four years, the Bush administration shamefully let both its public diplomacy and military information efforts languish without sufficient funding, staffing and attention. A "Strategic Communications" assessment for the Pentagon last fall was devastating in its indictment of how those failures have hindered the cause in Iraq, and how the lack of a clear mission with achievable goals still impedes the U.S. military effort.

Yet even if we stick to the six-pack "outposts of tyranny" versus the evil threesome of before, it's bound to be seen - as it's seen in Iraq - as another way America is imposing its will and its hegemony, not its freedoms.

And if the Bush team thinks its soaring call to liberty substitutes for the pragmatism so urgently required to retool the Iraq mission, the nation really is in trouble.

The "axis of evil" got us war with Iraq. We need to repair that mistake, not look for more societies to disrupt in an ill-thought-out imposition-of-democracy crusade.

Sullivan is The Plain Dealer's foreign-affairs columnist and an associate editor of the editorial pages.

2005 © The Plain Dealer

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