The term “axis of evil” came up just once in George W. Bush’s 3,000-word State-of-the-Union address in 2002, but that was enough for the words of the former president to be known forever after as his “Axis of Evil” speech.

Critics of our 43rd president — more outspoken than they had ever been of his father, George H. W. Bush, the 41st president — loved this reference, not for the truth in the phrase but for the ammunition it gave them, deriding his decision the next year to send troops into Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. How ridiculous, they believed, to think Iran, Iraq and North Korea could all have been conspiring in an evil “axis.”

While we no longer hear too many voices denouncing the phrase today, more than two decades later, it’s difficult to deny the hard truth in his words. Bush wound up his brief allusion to the evil they might create with the warning, “They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred.”

Regrettably, his enduring words have come back to haunt us.

The regimes in Pyongyang and Tehran are in closer cahoots than ever. North Korea........

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