This morning I awoke to find these headlines as my Yahoo homepage’s four “Top Stories:”

West can’t abandon Iraq, says deputy PM

Iran won’t retreat from atomic rights: president

Diplomacy but still no end to Korean crisis

Taliban leader warns of fierce fighting to come

Jeepers, I thought, though I didn’t use the word “jeepers.” Look at that. Those stories have something in common. Something familiar. Something that links them all…

Oh, yeah.

Nearly five years ago now, at his first State of the Union, President Bush assured a still metaphorically shell-shocked nation that the recently literally shell-shocked nation of Afghanistan was under control and that we were ready to take on the remaining bad guys…. the Axis of Evil.

These days, some people are saying that calling them an “Axis of Evil” actually caused them to become an Axis of Evil, that in that moment Bush had created something more than a perennial contender for future punk bands looking for a name. I don’t know. Still, when you identify three enemies and then immediately take out the first on your list, the other two are bound to start signaling for the check and nervously fingering their valet stub (see B. D. Julien’s, “The Global Bistro - the Restaurant as Colorful but Overextended Metaphor for World Politics,” Halfass Press, 1998).

But what’s important here is that whether or not the Axis was a self-fulfilling prophecy, of those enemies identified in that speech fiive years ago, those four of “One Down and Three to Go” fame… all four of them are still dominating the headlines as gigantic and yet-to-be-solved problems. We’ve got angry diners at all of our tables, and the parties whom we thought had paid and gone already are still lingering in their seats, ordering coffee and perusing the dessert menu again, threatening to still be there when the dinner service begins in half an hour (ibid).

Rotten metaphors aside, it’s worth pointing out that five years after Pearl Harbor, the guys who really earned the Axis moniker, the ones who didn’t need an “of Evil” to make it cleat what their team jerseys were getting at, were out of business. Finito, Benito.

What if the world had looked like this five years after Pearl Harbor? All due respect to the Greatest Generation, but our problem might not be our collective Will to Fight in this global restaurant. It might have more to do with our feckless head waiter.

So, though I’m hoping that this weekend’s meetings went well, you have to wonder - what exactly is an “axis,” according to the Administration? I think at the moment they’ve got it down as “that thing that you spin on.” Which is right, of course, technically. Technically.