By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 20 June 2023

President George W. Bush said in his first State of the Union speech after 9/11, on 29 January 2002:

Our nation will continue to be steadfast, and patient and persistent in the pursuit of two great objectives. First, we will shut down terrorist camps, disrupt terrorist plans and bring terrorists to justice. … Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction. …

North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom. Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. … This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens …

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.

The “Axis of Evil” concept—that there were rogue states collaborating across ideological and theological lines with each other and in support of the international jihadist terrorist network—was roundly criticised at the time and the term is now often used as a punchline.

The critics were treading a well-worn path: throughout the Cold War, the idea that the Soviet Union was behind the international Communist terrorist movement was treated by much of academia and the press as a piece of absurdist paranoia. We now have the documents and it is clear the KGB was indeed orchestrating these movements, from the “urban guerrillas” of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and Red Brigades in Europe to the “national liberation movements” like the African National Congress (ANC) and the Sandinistas to the pioneers of modern international terrorism, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and other Arab militants warring against Israel. That the Soviets often did this by proxy, either through the Captive Nations (East Germany particularly) or Syria only underlined how wildly wrong the consensus analysis had been in denying that there was state involvement in terrorism.

The disparagement of the “Axis of Evil” is even stranger, especially when it is done now, because the truth of the concept was visible so close to the time. (In fairness, this was also true of the Soviets, at least for anyone who wanted to know.) There is no question about North Korea’s extensive input to Iran’s nuclear-weapons program—including the attempt to export this program to Syria—and Pyongyang’s attempt to sell long-range missiles and the production system for the same to Saddam Husayn, a transaction (also organised through Bashar al-Asad’s Syria) that was aborted only because of the Coalition troops on Iraq’s borders in early 2003. And Saddam’s relationship with Al-Qaeda remains contests more for political reasons than empirical ones.

The focus of this note, though, is Iran, specifically the contemporary scepticism about Iran’s inclusion in the “axis”, and the lasting imprint of the debate surrounding it.

In 2002-03, Iran’s support for Sunni Islamist militant groups, including Al-Qaeda, was one of the most closely guarded U.S. secrets and the “Axis of Evil” speech was one of the early Bush administration attempts to publicise this information. It proved to be—in a notoriously competitive field—one of the most controversial parts of the administration’s messaging strategy.

The central argument against including Iran in the “axis” was essentially one of disbelief: Iran is a “Shi’a” state, so the argument went, and therefore hostile to “Sunni” jihadists like Al-Qaeda. The corollary, in this view, was that Iran should be considered at least a potential ally in the “War on Terror”, rather than one of its targets.

(There was an ancillary furore with the claims, pushed by Ryan Crocker, that Tehran had extended assistance to the NATO mission in Afghanistan and was hoping this would lead to a broader rapprochement or “grand bargain” with the U.S. until the “Axis of Evil” speech. This silly talking point does not meet the most cursory test of the timeline—Iran has supported the Taliban-Qaeda forces since the 1990s and gave them important military support ahead of the NATO invasion of Afghanistan in 2001—nor does it understand the nature of the revolutionary government in Iran that has an eternal struggle with the U.S.-led West as the foundation of its ideology and legitimacy. But the talking point is politically convenient for some, so it continues to circulate.)

Following up the President’s State of the Union address, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told ABC’s “This Week” on 3 February 2002 that Iran’s government was allowing Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces into the country, adding “We have any number of reports more recently that they have been supplying arms in Afghanistan”. A year later, on 11 February 2003, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), George Tenet, noted in his testimony to Congress: “We see disturbing signs that Al-Qaeda has established a presence in both Iran and Iraq.”

Months after that, on 20 May 2003, shortly after Saddam had been overthrown, Rumsfeld, at one of his famously rambunctious press conferences, said: “There’s no question but that there are Al-Qaeda in Iran”, and alluded to the solid intelligence the U.S. already had that Al-Qaeda’s leaders in Iran had (in collaboration with the Islamic State movement in Iraq) orchestrated the attacks in Riyadh and Casablanca days earlier.

In the summer of 2003, the governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia would make public statements confirming that senior Al-Qaeda officials were in Iran.

It made little difference. Many “experts” had made up their mind that to speak of cooperation between “Shi’a” Iran and “Sunni” Al-Qaeda was a borderline conspiracy theory, if not an attempt by the administration at outright deception for some nefarious purpose—and this sectarian “analysis” will never quite die. The administration was right, though, and in the years to come the evidence would pile up, leaving only the committed apologists for the Islamic Republic to deny it, not that there was ever any lack of such people.

What is disheartening is the failure of good-faith analysts. It should have been apparent even in real time that the administration was on to something, especially to those paid to notice these things.

The interception on 3 January 2002 of the Karine A ship, sent by the Iranians through the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) division in Lebanon (“Hizballah”) to Yasser Arafat’s PLO as it intensified its terrorist “intifada” against Israel—coincidentally right as Iran was letting Al-Qaeda take shelter within its borders—was a public signal that the Shi’a-Sunni division was perhaps not so insurmountable.

It soon became clear that Iran was the most significant source of money, training, and weaponry for HAMAS and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the main providers of suicide bombers during the Second Intifada, and had been since at least the mid-1990s. Added to this were overt IRGC/Hizballah activities as a clearly coordinated second front of the “intifada”.

The fact Al-Qaeda’s leadership was in Iran was something even the clerical regime had to admit as early as the end of May 2003. The Islamic Republic’s claim that the Qaedaists were in some form of “custody” against their will was something that could only ever have been believed by those who wanted to. Iran had established operational links with Usama bin Laden’s group in 1992, and this was made plain in the 2004 9/11 Commission Report, relying on a mere fraction of the available National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence.

The depth and longevity of Iran’s collaboration with Al-Qaeda has been added to by revelations about inter alia their activities in Bosnia, and there is no longer any attempt to hide the Iranian control of the Palestinian terrorist movements.

It was well-known before the Iraq invasion that the Islamic State’s founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had come through Iran to Saddam’s Iraq in the spring of 2002. Again, it should not have taken much analytical prowess to understand—as later evidence confirmed—that the clerical regime had helped Zarqawi in multiple ways. The Iranian regime’s assistance to the IS movement after that, by commission and omission, would be documented in the mid-2000s on the ground in Iraq, in the form of captured telephones and documents, intercepted communications, and public U.S. Treasury sanctions notifications.

It took a little more time to gather concrete evidence of Iran’s support to the Taliban insurgency within Afghanistan, something Iran later stopped concealing, but, again, for those who supposedly understand how terrorist states and organisations work, this deduction should not have been that difficult, especially after the U.S. government had said it in public in February 2002. It is difficult to escape the conclusion, however, that precisely because the U.S. government had said it, many were determined to ignore it. This would certainly be the preferrable explanation for the truculent response in so much of the press in January 2021 when then-President Donald Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, made a rather anodyne speech highlighting the fact Iran was protecting (or trying to) Al-Qaeda’s leadership. It would be immensely depressing if the commentary disputing this issued out of sincere ignorance.