Idiot's Guide to the Axis of Evil

Mystery solved. On Sept. 6 of last year, Israeli warplanes struck a facility in the deserts of eastern Syria. The Israelis refused to explain what they had hit or why. The Syrians immediately bulldozed the site to block all further investigation. The U.S. government acknowledged the attack but declined otherwise to comment. And the world was left to speculate.

On Thursday, the Bush administration at last confirmed what had long been rumored: The Syrian facility was indeed a nuclear plant. The plant followed the same design as the Yongbyon plant in North Korea, and North Korean engineers and workers had helped to build it. North Korea and Syria had initiated discussions on the plant in 1997. Construction had commenced in 2005. When the Israelis struck, the plant was only weeks from completion.

All that would have been needed then would have been enough plutonium to start a weapons production cycle. Had the Syrians been allowed to proceed, they might well have been a nuclear weapons state by now.

This terrible story carries some significant lessons.

1) For years we have heard that it was impossible, inconceivable, that states such as Syria, North Korea, Iran or Saddam Hussein's Iraq could ever co-operate with each other. We were told that Shiite Iran could never possibly ally with Sunni terrorist groups such as Hamas or al-Qaeda. Yet again and again, over the past half dozen years, we have witnessed just that. North Korea did help Syria. Iran and North Korea did exchange technology. Iran did subsidize Hamas. Al-Qaeda leaders did find refuge in Iran.

You know, it's almost like they form an axis or something.

2) Many have urged the Bush administration to "reach out" to Syria. The Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by Lee Hamilton and James Baker, suggested that Syria could help broker a solution inside Iraq. Before that, Clinton secretary of state Warren Christopher elaborately courted Syria, visiting Damascus more often than any other government on Earth. Yet the bad faith, aggression and recklessness of the Syrian regime continue unabated.

Happily, this latest deadly threat was intercepted in time. But can we at last recognize that Syria's Assad regime is part of the problem in the Middle East--not part of the solution?

3) Democrats and liberals have fiercely criticized the Bush administration for focusing on state sponsors of terrorism such as Syria and Iran, instead of focusing exclusively on non-state terror groups such as al-Qaeda. We've even heard it said that focusing on state sponsors of terror is a "distraction." But terrorists with nuclear weapons are a lot more dangerous than terrorists who lack them. Al-Qaeda's attempts to acquire nuclear weaponry have fizzled. It is from states such as Syria and Iran and North Korea that the threat of nuclear terrorism chiefly comes.

4) Military action against nuclear facilities can be effective--especially if those facilities are located far from population centres, as Syria's was. And despite Syria's command of terrorist organizations, there has been no Syrian terrorist retaliation. Something to think about in connection with the much more ominous Iranian nuclear program.

5) The revelations underscore the lethal naivete of the advisers around Barack Obama. As Gabriel Schoenfeld has pointed out on the Commentary magazine blog, Joseph Cirincione, the man most widely identified as Obama's top nuclear-affairs adviser, last September pooh-poohed as "far-right" "nonsense" the early rumors that the Syrian nuclear facility was indeed a nuclear facility.

Cirincione wrote on the Foreign Policy blog: "This [early news of the Syrian facility] appears to be the work of a small group of officials leaking cherry-picked, unvetted 'intelligence' to key reporters in order to promote a pre-existing political agenda. If this sounds like the run-up to the war in Iraq, it should. This time it appears aimed at derailing the U.S.-North Korean agreement that administration hardliners think is appeasement. Some Israelis want to thwart any dialogue between the U.S. and Syria."

Cirincione seems to have been so determined to avert what he regarded as the threat of U.S. over-reaction--so eager to promote dialogue with Syria--that he blinded himself to the reality of a nuclear threat.

And this way of thinking is not, unfortunately, unique to him. It pervades the Democratic foreign policy establishment--and especially that portion of the establishment that has gravitated to Obama.

So here's the final lesson from this week's: For the safety of the world, these people have to be kept far, far away from political power.