Morjes!

Welcome to my blog. I write about fitting in, sticking out, and missing the motherland as a serial foreigner.

The Axis of Semi-Evil, ten years on

In early 2002, this humorous article about an Axis of Semi-Evil came out. Jeremy and I read it and laughed and laughed. It was just a few months after 9/11, and President Bush had described an Axis of Evil (of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea) in his State of the Union address.

For some reason, I got to thinking about this article recently. I don't know where it was originally published [thanks to Steve in the comments, the link has been updated to its original source], but you can find it at the link above. Read it. It's still funny, even hilarious. But parts of it also made me sad, parts that didn't make me sad ten years ago.

The idea of a sulking Bashar al-Assad isn't as innocuous as it once was. Saddam Hussein is dead. Libya is different. Iran is different (kind of). North Korea has a different leader, even if he's more of the same. I think the Kissinger line would probably refer to Newt Gingrich if this article were written today.

What do you think? Does a re-read of this article ten years later make you laugh or cry, or a little of both?

Fujairah

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