If media reports of last week's IAF raid in Syria pan out, the attack against a North-Korean-supplied Syrian nuclear facility in eastern Syria should serve as a pivotal event in the free world's understanding of the enemy it faces in the current global war. The central question now is whether this clarity will be followed by a strategic shift in the US and Israeli governments' conceptualizations of the challenges facing them in the various theaters of war and diplomacy in which they are now engaged.

What the raid exposed is that the free world faces a cohesive alliance of enemy forces that collaborate closely in their joint and separate offensives against their common foes. Whether or not it is called the axis of evil, after the IAF raid it is undeniable that its members - North Korea, Iran and Syria - collaborate closely in their joint war.

Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, this is not a temporary alliance of convenience among three otherwise unrelated states. It is a strategic alignment of three regimes that have been acting in tandem on multiple levels for decades. Their collaborative operations have served two primary functions. First they cooperate in perpetuating their holds on power. This they do primarily through criminal enterprises. Second, they work together to wage war against their common foes. The second objective is advanced primarily through the proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

Furthermore, all three regimes view diplomatic exchanges with their enemies not as a means to solve their disagreements with them, but as a means to gain advantage by forcing US, Israeli and international concessions that legitimize their regimes and enable them to continue to conduct their war.

TIES BETWEEN the countries have been developing since the 1980s. That cooperation blossomed into a full-scale alliance during the 1990s. This is notable because the 1990s marked the period when both US and Israeli foreign policies centered on repeated attempts to appease all three governments.

In 1994, the US embraced appeasement of North Korea when it signed the Agreed Framework that maintained the economic viability of the North Korean regime in exchange for Pyongyang's pledge to end its nuclear weapons program. The US appeased Teheran by embracing the supposedly moderate government of president Muhammad Khatami, and downplayed Iran's role in terrorist bombings of US targets like the 1996 Iranian-ordered bombing of the US Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia.

Israel pursued appeasement through the Oslo peace process with the PLO, its refusal to contend effectively with the Iranian- and Syrian-sponsored Hizbullah forces in Lebanon, and through its conduct of intense negotiations with the Syrians toward an Israeli surrender of the strategically vital Golan Heights.

It was during the 1990s that North Korean-Iranian-Syrian criminal cooperation reached its apex. It was also during this decade that they made the greatest headway in their ballistic missile and weapons of mass destruction programs. These advances were made while all three regimes pocketed concessions made by the US and Israel, and systematically breached all their commitments to both countries and to international treaties of which they are signatories.

ONE OF the inheritances the mullahs received from the Shah of Iran after they overthrew him in 1979 was a US-supplied Intaglio currency printing press. Since at least 1989 this printing press has been used to produce so-called "super-notes."

Super-notes are highly sophisticated counterfeit US bills that are nearly undetectable. The advent of the super-notes forced the US Treasury to print new currency twice in a decade. In 1992 a Congressional Task Force concluded that the bills which proliferated in Lebanon's Hizbullah and Syrian-controlled Beka'a Valley were of Iranian and Syrian origin. In 2005, the first super-notes were intercepted in the US. They were sourced to North Korea.

According to a report Sunday in Yediot Aharonot, Iran has financed its purchase of nuclear and other materiel from North Korea through the provision of super-notes to Pyongyang. The US believes that Pyongyang itself procured a Swiss-made Intaglio press sometime in the 1990s. Intelligence services agree that Iran, Syria and North Korea collaborate closely in their currency-counterfeiting operations.

In 2003, the State Department concluded that the North Korean regime had sustained its economic viability principally through counterfeit currency operations.

IN SEPTEMBER 2005, the US launched a financial offensive against North Korea which could potentially have led to the eventual financial collapse of the regime when it labeled the Banco Delta Asia, a Macau-based bank, an agent of North Korean money-laundering. The move followed a US investigation showing that BDA was North Korea's primary conduit for laundering counterfeit currency. The move effectively cut Pyongyang out of international financial markets, making it far more difficult for the North Koreans to sustain the regime financially.

North Korea's response to the move was to expand its nuclear and missile collaboration with Iran and Syria still further. Throughout the 1990s, the North Koreans provided Iran and Syria with ballistic missiles, and then missile technologies and assembly plants. After the BDA affair, in July and October 2006 North Korea conducted intermediate and long-range missile tests and then a nuclear test. Iranian scientists were reportedly present at all tests.

THE US responded to the North Korean provocations by intensifying its diplomatic efforts. Those efforts led to the signing of the February 13, 2007 bilateral deal between the US and North Korea, in which Pyongyang pledged to end its nuclear programs within 60 days in exchange for diplomatic acceptance by the US and economic assistance from the US and the international community. In exchange for the North Korean pledge, the US secretly agreed to unfreeze North Korean accounts at BDA and so paved the way for North Korean reentry to international financial markets. Continued...