The State of the Union has been the occasion for many very bad ideas. I’ve been watching them for decades, and today, ahead of Trump’s address, I am going to blog on some of the worst moments in 21st-century State of the Union addresses.
The first State of the Union I covered in person was in 2002, which was about five months after Sept. 11. With terrorist attacks on our minds, there was a lot of anxiety in the Capitol building that day.
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We reporters in the press gallery were counting the Cabinet members to see who was the designated survivor — the person in the line of succession who stays home in case a bomb blows up the Capitol. Finally, one reporter said, “Oh no, it’s Ashcroft,” the socially conservative attorney general. Another reporter replied along the lines of “at least we’ll all be dead.” Laughter filled our section of the press gallery.
We knew President George W. Bush would talk about America’s response to 9/11 and our victory over the Taliban. We all knew he would call for the next step in this “War on Terror” (it was not “terrorism,” but “terror” we were supposedly fighting): regime change in Iraq.
We didn’t expect him to lengthen our list of targets and posit a new set of Axis Powers.
North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, “and their terrorist allies constitute an Axis of Evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world,” Bush said. In the face of this “axis,” he added, “the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”
Bush continued: “Our War on Terror is well begun, but it is only begun. This campaign may not be finished on our watch — yet it must be, and it will be waged on our watch.
“We can’t stop short. If we stop now — leaving terror camps intact and terror states unchecked — our sense of security would be false and temporary. History has called America and our allies to action, and it is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom’s fight.”
Bush’s “War on Terror,” it became clear that night, was not about punishing and disarming the perpetrators of 9/11. It was not about targeting terrorist groups. It was a crusade to end evil in this world.
More than one of us noted that night that North Korea, Iran, and Iraq as an “Axis” made no sense.
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In World War II, the Axis Powers were Germany, Italy, and Japan (plus some allies such as Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria). They were allies who were fighting and planning together and sharing resources and intelligence.
Iran and Iraq were mortal enemies. There was no evidence of Iranian-North Korean corruption. The Iraqi-North Korean cooperation was hardly strong enough to constitute an Axis.
The 2002 State of the Union address planted the seeds for Bush’s crusade to end evil, and the result was a disastrous regime change in Iraq, an accelerated nuclear program in both Iran and North Korea, two countries where evil regimes are still in control.