The Bush administration's newly unveiled national security strategy might well be subtitled "The Irony of Iran". Three years after the invasion of Iraq and the invention of the phrase "axis of evil", the administration now highlights the threat posed by Iran – whose radical government has been vastly strengthened by the invasion of Iraq. This is more tragedy than strategy, and it reflects the Manichean approach this administration has taken to the world.

It is sometimes convenient, for purposes of rhetorical effect, for national leaders to talk of a globe neatly divided into good and bad. It is quite another, however, to base the policies of the world's most powerful nation upon that fiction. The administration's penchant for painting its perceived adversaries with the same sweeping brush has led to a series of unintended consequences.