Con Coughlin-21/09/2007

Con Coughlin, (Daily Telegraph)

"Just when we thought we'd seen the back of one axis of evil, up pops another one to give us all sleepless nights.

The original axis of evil, as defined by President George W Bush in his State of the Union address in January 2002, consisted of Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

In fact, this axis was always an unlikely amalgam, conjured from the imagination of David Frum, the President's chief speechwriter at the time, who was casting around for a suitably demonic phrase to capture the gravity of the threat America was said to face from its combined enemies in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

The phrase made great headlines, but the reality was that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had no meaningful ties to Pyongyang or Teheran, other than a shared hatred of American military supremacy.

This summer it appeared that, with the stubborn exception of Iran, Mr Bush's axis of evil was on the wane: Saddam's regime no longer threatened the Gulf oil fields that fuel the West's economies, and the North Koreans appeared to be moving towards decommissioning the nuclear reactor that enabled it to test an atom bomb last autumn.

There were even signs that the serious economic hardship Iran was suffering because of its controversial nuclear programme had prompted the mullahs to have a serious rethink about pursuing the holy grail of uranium enrichment.

All that optimism seems wildly out of place following this week's revelation that the Israeli Air Force launched a daredevil attack on a remote region of northern Syria to destroy a top-secret military facility.

The precise nature of the target remains a matter of intense speculation, not least because the Israeli government has imposed a news black-out on the events of the night of September 6; and the Syrians, whose much-vaunted, Russian-built air defence systems failed to detect, let alone repel, the intruders, have been equally secretive.

But judging from the small scraps of information that have emerged, it would be fair to conclude that a new axis of evil is under construction, with Syria assuming Iraq's place. But unlike Iraq, Syria has well-documented links to the pariah regimes in North Korea and Teheran, and is cooperating with them on a range of projects, from the acquisition of long-range ballistic missiles to the development of chemical and nuclear weapons."

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