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Axis of Evil News Roundup
Sunday, February 6th, 2005 09:10 pmDonald Rumsfield has allowed the world to breath a little more easily by deciding that Iran is years away from having a nuclear weapon, which presumably means that the USA is also years away from invading Iran. After the embarrassment of the non-existent WMD in Iraq, it is only to be expected that the US should strike a more epistemologically conservative note on Iran: "I don't make estimates, that's the business for the intelligence community. But they're some years away according to the estimates, but I don't know if the estimates are correct or not," says Rumsfield.
The Iranians, on the other hand, are unequivocal in (a) denying that they have any intention of developing nuclear weapons and (b) maintaining that if the Americans don't shut up, they will develop them. "If such an attack takes place then of course we will retaliate and we will definitely accelerate our activities to complete our fuel cycle and make nuclear fuel," said the secretary-general of Iran's Supreme National Security Council. As threats (or counter-threats, in this case) go, this does not sound terribly convincing. I'm sure that the Iranians could accelerate their activities, but not enough to get a nuclear bomb together before the Americans arrived in Tehran.
Compare this to the strategy of North Korea, which has done its best to convince the world that it already has nuclear weapons, with the latest twist being the rumour that it provided enriched uranium to Libya. If Saddam Hussein, instead of claiming (truthfully, as it turned out) that he had no WMD, had fed the CIA disinformation that he probably already had ICBMs, he would probably still be sitting in his palace, happily torturing political dissidents. Meanwhile, the North Koreans, with the American threat receding into the distance, have turned their attention to a more serious problem: bad haircuts. The focus of the campaign is a TV programme with the catchy name Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle. The message is simple: short hair good, long hair bad. Hidden cameras expose long-haired louts, who are publicly denounced. Long hair is not only a sign of anti-socialist foreign influence, but can reduce intelligence, since it requires nutrition which could otherwise be used by the brain. In the light of this interesting biological theory, it is surprising that only men are required to get crew cuts. Surely in the glorious socialist era, women's brains should be equally protected from exploitation by capitalist hairstyles. [Apologies for the late arrival of this news, but I can't keep an eye on everything in the Axis of Evil.]
The rest of the Axis has been pretty quiet since Iraq had its membership suspended, pending the final results of the recent elections. If the mullahs win a landslide majority, there is a slight possibility that it could regain at least associate membership status, but even this would be hard with all those American troops still in place. As for Libya, there has been hardly a squeak of evil since Gaddafi, cashing in on the fact that America didn't want a war on two fronts, announced over a year ago that he would be a good boy and get rid of his WMD. The worst that Libya has been able to come up with recently is Gaddafi's football-playing son Hannibal, who has been involved in a few minor brawls in Paris and Copenhagen. As a result, Libya has now been demoted to the Axis of Antisocial Behaviour.
The Iranians, on the other hand, are unequivocal in (a) denying that they have any intention of developing nuclear weapons and (b) maintaining that if the Americans don't shut up, they will develop them. "If such an attack takes place then of course we will retaliate and we will definitely accelerate our activities to complete our fuel cycle and make nuclear fuel," said the secretary-general of Iran's Supreme National Security Council. As threats (or counter-threats, in this case) go, this does not sound terribly convincing. I'm sure that the Iranians could accelerate their activities, but not enough to get a nuclear bomb together before the Americans arrived in Tehran.
Compare this to the strategy of North Korea, which has done its best to convince the world that it already has nuclear weapons, with the latest twist being the rumour that it provided enriched uranium to Libya. If Saddam Hussein, instead of claiming (truthfully, as it turned out) that he had no WMD, had fed the CIA disinformation that he probably already had ICBMs, he would probably still be sitting in his palace, happily torturing political dissidents. Meanwhile, the North Koreans, with the American threat receding into the distance, have turned their attention to a more serious problem: bad haircuts. The focus of the campaign is a TV programme with the catchy name Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle. The message is simple: short hair good, long hair bad. Hidden cameras expose long-haired louts, who are publicly denounced. Long hair is not only a sign of anti-socialist foreign influence, but can reduce intelligence, since it requires nutrition which could otherwise be used by the brain. In the light of this interesting biological theory, it is surprising that only men are required to get crew cuts. Surely in the glorious socialist era, women's brains should be equally protected from exploitation by capitalist hairstyles. [Apologies for the late arrival of this news, but I can't keep an eye on everything in the Axis of Evil.]
The rest of the Axis has been pretty quiet since Iraq had its membership suspended, pending the final results of the recent elections. If the mullahs win a landslide majority, there is a slight possibility that it could regain at least associate membership status, but even this would be hard with all those American troops still in place. As for Libya, there has been hardly a squeak of evil since Gaddafi, cashing in on the fact that America didn't want a war on two fronts, announced over a year ago that he would be a good boy and get rid of his WMD. The worst that Libya has been able to come up with recently is Gaddafi's football-playing son Hannibal, who has been involved in a few minor brawls in Paris and Copenhagen. As a result, Libya has now been demoted to the Axis of Antisocial Behaviour.
