Recently I have indicated a number of areas of foreign and defense policy in which the legacy of the administration of George W. Bush continues to thrive, despite the campaign promises of Barack Obama to roll back much of it.  One of the best examples is in Iraq, where we have been presented with the curious notion of his Vice President proclaiming that Iraq is destined to be “one of the great achievements of this administration”, a comment requiring a level of gall that is outlandish even by Joe Biden standards.

Further evidence of the success of the bold decision by Bush to pursue the final surge in Iraq will be validated by the  elections there this month, which will provide additional confirmation of the pathway to a truly representative Middle Eastern government beholden to no single tyrant or ruling tribe, an astonishing thought only three years ago.

There is, of course, a way that the Obama administration can fumble this historic opportunity left him by Bush’s Freedom Agenda, as Francis Fukuyama has so well cautioned:  he can revert to accommodation and reliance on the region’s dictatorial strongmen in places like Eqypt, Jordan, and Morocco.  And I would add a second way:   not to actively  support the democratic forces of regime change in Iran, which is very long overdue.

However faulty the articulation of the Freedom Agenda, it was and is the correct strategy, but we have now allowed it to be co-opted by the fear initiated by the Hamas uprising in the Gaza elections in 2006.  This fear has been seized upon by the self-serving authoritarians in the region, who caution us to “be careful what we ask for” and who present themselves as the only bulwark against radicalism.  Is there risk here?  Sure, but the risk of a radicalized democratic outcome is outweighed by the risks in continuation of the status quo in pursuit of elusive “stability”.  Thanks to George Bush, Iraq is the winning model;  let’s encourage and support its export.

and maybe the most significant aside from the future evaluation of success in Iraq, will be his appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, on which I have previously commented.   More recent evidence here are the decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission and the likely decision in McDonald vs. Chicago. In Citizens United, the Court bailed out Bush in his failure to veto the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Act, which had severely limited free speech in elections, by reversing key elements of the bill and re-establishing the First Amendment right to  free speech for corporations and unions.  This is a far reaching landmark and, of course, the Democrats are crying foul and have already introduced legislation that would reinstitute the limits on corporations, but  not disturb the free speech of labor unions, trial lawyers, and other favored interests of the left.  In the McDonald case, based on recently conducted oral arguments, the Court is very likely to extend the ban on federal restrictions on the individual right to bear arms in the recently decided District of Columbia vs. Heller case to similar gun control laws enacted by the states.  The grounding of this decision should be evident in the Second Amendment and it, along with the decision in Heller, will be milestones.  In these and a growing number of cases, we have decisions that would have been inconceivable without the change in the dynamics of the Court produced by the Bush appointments.

At the dawn of the Obama administration, the mission of U. S.-Russian relations was characterized by “reset”, even to the point of a silly reset button visual aid presented to Russian leadership by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  What reset means to the Russians was described by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev as “to move beyond Cold War mentalities and chart a fresh start in relations between the two countries”.  One of my problems with all of this reset talk has been that we have never really told the truth about the Cold War or the relative ideological positions of its major antagonists, nor has there been the transparency of a “truth commission” to introduce the full reality of the failed Soviet regime to the Russian people.  On the other hand, we have heard former Russian President Putin describe the collapse of the Soviet empire as “the greatest political catastrophe of the 20th century”, and we have witnessed aggression on the part of the Russians that could serve no purpose other than to restore their hegemony over the sovereign states that once constituted this empire.  Reset?  Whose Cold War mentalities?

In a recent issue of “Cato’s Letter”, former Soviet political dissident and author Vladimir Bukovsky has some interesting things to say, such as:  “The Cold War was a confrontation between liberal democracy and totalitarian socialism.  It was an ideological battle, a war of ideas.  And a war we never won.  We never even fought it…………..Because we didn’t win it, it isn’t over.  To do it we need a Nuremburg trial, but not a trial of people; it isn’t about judging individuals, it’s about judging the system.”

Bukovsky spent considerable time and effort trying to persuade the Yeltsin government to conduct such a trial, to no avail.  Why not?  Yeltsin was under tremendous pressure not to do so, mainly from the West, as he reports, as a result of the deep collaboration between left-wing parties in the West and the former Soviet Union.  This extended to the leadership of the movement for the European Union, which believed that the disclosure of the total failure of the socialist experiment in Russia would discredit the left in Europe.  It is painful to note that Bukovsky believes, with some credibility since much of it is well documented, that the U. S. was complicit in supporting the Soviet Union  in its attempt to prevent the breakup of its empire.

This is useful perspective from one who witnessed this monumental transformation from the inside out.  Now think back to President Obama’s Russian summit of July 2009.  In her reporting on the meetings, Liz Cheney described them primarily in terms of a comparison of two different versions of the end of the Cold War–the Russian version and the truth–with President Obama endorsing the Russian version.  In characterizing the conflict, Obama couched the confrontation in terms better suited for an athletic, business, or scientific competition, implying a moral equivalency between the two systems that belies the worldwide battle between freedom and tyranny that was actually the case.

The point is this:  if by “reset” the Obama administration has in mind some form of revisionism of the history of the ideological conflict that was the Cold War that implies any moral equivalency between the two systems, as it evidently does, or if there is any intention to have another generation of young Russians be sheltered from the truth about that conflict and the evil Soviet regime that waged it, the American people, who financed and won a hard-fought 46-year war,  should completely reject this aspect of U. S. foreign policy and those who implement it.

For as long as there has been an American party of the left, it has been associated with an obsession with the notion of “fairness” and a related hatred of social and economic inequality of condition, which is often closely allied with envy and even hatred of the “rich”.  This began long before the late John Rawls, but he was one of the more recent and most articulate philosophers of fairness, and his A Theory of Justice (1971) is a classic in the field.  One of the signature principles for which he is best known is the “difference principle”, which provides that inequalities in distribution of social and economic goods should be allowed only to the extent that they directly improve the condition of the least advantaged members of society.  This has grown to be the left’s underlying basis for a definition of “fairness” in public policy.  A current devotee of Rawls is Ronald Dworkin, whose views on distributive justice can be summarized by a quote from his book, Sovereign Virtue:  “a distribution of wealth that dooms some citizens to a less than fulfilling life than others, no matter what choices they make, is unacceptable, and the neglect of equality in contemporary politics is therefore shameful”.

Does this resonate with any rhetoric that we have heard lately?  Well, it should, because essentially all of the Obama administration’s domestic policy is drenched in it.  It is not far from the  surface in almost every pronouncement and proposal, from taxation to budgets to financial regulation to energy to employment policy to education to health care.

There is an antidote to this madness and, as usual, Thomas Sowell is here when we need him.  He has recently written a series of essays under the title, “The Fallacy of Fairness” in which he totally discredits the notions of distributive justice described by Rawls and his followers and goes even further in illustrating the futility of the pursuit of fairness by describing the ways in which the discrimination of nature itself dwarfs any form of discrimination conceived by man.  His conclusion is that fairness as equal treatment does not produce fairness as equal outcomes, and that the confusion between the two meanings of the word has created enormous mischief, much of it at the expense of the lagging groups of people in our society.   Much more of Sowell on the subject can be found in his 1999 book, The Quest for Cosmic Justice, which historically shows how confused conceptions of “fairness”, equality,  and justice consistently end up promoting injustice and inequality.

Studies conducted in recent years and reported by Arthur C. Brooks of Syracuse University reveal that, contrary to the claims of the fairness cult, to focus public policy on inequality instead of opportunity is to make a serious error, one that will worsen the problem we hope to solve.  In fact, the survey data tell us that economic mobility, not equality, is associated with happiness among the population.  These findings and the common sense analysis of the historical development of cultures and political economy are pretty conclusive on the means by which opportunity and mobility are enhanced, but some people will never learn and some don’t want to.

No less an authority than Lech Walesa (you remember him, the former electrician who stood up to the Soviet puppet government in Poland, which ultimately, with a little help from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the Pope,  led to the fall of the Soviet empire) recently made an insightful observation:  “The world has no leadership.  The U. S. was the last resort and hope for all nations.  Today, we have lost that hope; they don’t lead morally and politically anymore”.

Why is this the case?  Well, in my estimation, for a couple of reasons.  First, large segments of our institutional opinion leadership are dismissive of the notion of American moral leadership in the first place,  particularly as it pertains to American interests or the pursuit of American exceptionalism.  Second and more currently, we have so undermined our financial  solvency and economic viability with our reckless profligacy that we have become beholden to our creditors and are less capable of delivering the leadership the world needs from us.

These threats were essentially echoed by James Piereson in The New Criterion:  “I wonder whether the ideology underpinning the welfare state is antithetical to the kind of ideas and citizens that are required for a strong national defense.  The welfare state is based upon dependency and entitlement, while national defense needs to be based on something like duty as the price of citizenship”.

Western Europe has had an answer to this problem for about 60 years–let America handle it.  Lech Walesa and I are wondering–how much longer can America handle it?