The phrase “axis of evil” to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea as terrorist supporting regimes bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction has been greatly derided since first used by former president George W. Bush in his State of the Union address of January 2002.
The derision of Bush did not alter the facts of which he spoke, though there remain other centres of evil such as Sudan and Zimbabwe. China is in a category of its own that makes most member states of the UN too ready to appease Beijing.
But countries constituting the “axis of evil” stood apart for reasons that Bush explained.
Their support for terrorists and quest for nuclear weapons made them tyrannical rogue states with undisguised ambitions to destabilize regional balance and threaten neighbours with aggression. The reason for acquiring nuclear weapons by these rogue states was simple. It would make them invulnerable to external pressures and immune to internal demands for democracy and freedom.
In July 2006 North Korea successfully launched ballistic missiles. Then in May 2009 Kim Jong-Il’s Communist regime tested a nuclear weapon the size of a Hiroshima a-bomb. With such a show of force North Korea became a full-fledged nuclear weapon state. Iran is likely only months behind North Korea in its bid also to become a nuclear weapon state. Moreover, the recent display of brute force by the clerical regime against unarmed people protesting a fraudulent election has fully disclosed to the world its tyrannical nature.
Saddam
In removing Saddam Hussein from power, Bush made certain the world had one less tyranny in the “axis of evil” to deal with after he left office. The world, and especially western democracies, remain nevertheless pathetically confused and deliberately unwilling to deal with threats North Korea and Iran pose to their neighbours, while holding their populations to ransom.
Bush was right in speaking about the “axis of evil,” and what was required of the UN if it adhered to the principle of collective security. Developments in North Korea and Iran have proven, if more proof were needed, that Bush’s warning in 2002 about these rogue states was consistent with their recent history.
But the good Bush did in removing Iraq as a threat and helping Iraqis acquire freedom to make their own progress is generally unacknowledged, even as most intellectuals deride him. There is no surprise in this, for secular intellectuals as a class are wilfully blind to facts that render their ideology false. The ridicule for plain speaking leaders such as Bush—before him Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher—demonstrates the disdain of intellectuals for truth about evil.
Paul Johnson, in his best-selling book, Intellectuals, provided an insightful and revealing portrait of these people as a class. Intellectuals and their acolytes—as Johnson illustrated through the lives, for example, of Rousseau and Marx—are quite often loathsome individuals in their private lives, pathologically consumed by envy and lust for power, and responsible for making hell on earth for people around them. Their views deserve to be heard with much skepticism.
The derision of Bush not surprisingly was entirely consistent with the ways of intellectuals. Yet despite this derision, Bush was right then and vindicated since in his assessment of the “axis of evil.”
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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