to giving support to Japan. The Bush administration made important progress in deepening US-Japan security cooperation. Under Bush, bilateral security initiatives between the United States and Japan were centred on counter-terrorism cooperation. President Bush endorsed the idea that Japan should play a more active international role and praised Japan for its passage of the Anti-Terrorism Special Measures Law that allowed Japan to send refuelling tankers to the Indian Ocean to assist US-led operations in Afghanistan in 2001. On December 9, 2003, the Japanese Diet passed the Humanitarian Relief and Iraqi Reconstruction Special Measures Law that allowed Prime Minister Koizumi to dispatch the Self Defence Forces (SDF) to Iraq. In January 2004, Japan sent a total of 1,000 military personnel (including 550 Ground Self-Defence Force personnel and 450 Maritime Self-Defence Force and Air Self- Defence Force personnel) to Iraq to provide humanitarian assistance and take part in reconstruction activities. This was the first time in the post-war period Japanese troops were sent overseas without an inter- national mandate. Japan withdrew its ground forces in 2006 while a Japanese self-defence forces air division stayed in Iraq until the expiration of the UN authorisation for multilateral forces in Iraq in 2008. Indeed, under Bush, military cooperation between Washington and Tokyo in Afghanistan and Iraq became a new dimension and a symbol of their alliance. North Korea Bush publicly condemned Kim Jong-il of North Korea and identified North Korea as one of the three states in an "axis of evil" in his 2002 State of the Union Address. He said that "the United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." and that "North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens" Within months, "both countries had walked away from their respective commitments under the U.S.–DPRK Agreed Framework of October 1994." President Bush in his 2005 State of the Union Address, stated that "We're working closely with the governments in Asia to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions" and that "In the next 4 years, my administration will continue to build the coalitions that will defeat the dangers of our time". North Korea's October 9, 2006, detonation of a nuclear device further complicated Bush's foreign policy, which centered for both terms of his presidency on "[preventing] the terrorists and regimes who seek