Reagan and Bush

In an excellent article in the Jerusalem Post, Saul Singer compares Reagan and Bush in terms of the enemies they faced and their idea on what it will take to win.

It is fitting that Bush was in France to commemorate the 60th anniversary of D-Day when he said these words on the passing of Ronald Wilson Reagan. D-Day began the rollback of fascism in Europe. Reagan led the rollback of the Soviet communism. And America has, since 9/11, taken on the rollback of the third great global bid to spread tyranny in the world in the modern era, the jihad against America and Israel.
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Like World War II, the Cold War is now viewed retrospectively through American eyes as inevitable, just, and ending in the West's victory. But as Reagan himself pointed out in his farewell address, the policies that he espoused were widely derided as "dangerous" before and during his tenure.

Reagan's critics accused him of risking nuclear war. Reagan seemed almost alone in understanding that the only way to end the Cold War was for the Soviet Union to cease to exist, and that that day would come. In the end, it came even quicker than he imagined.

Reagan was vilified at the time for calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire," much as Bush has been derided for fingering the "axis of evil." And Bush seems to have a similarly unpopular insight that the jihad will only end when the regimes that support it have gone the way of either Gaddafi or Saddam and the entire region is on the path to freedom.

In all three modern global conflicts the pattern has been the same: a Western reluctance to recognize both the scope of the danger and the power of its own secret weapon, the power of freedom. In World War II the need for complete victory was eventually recognized, but in the Cold War and the current conflict, the assumption of indefinite, perhaps even deteriorating, stalemate is widespread.
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After 9/11, America rediscovered that the quest for freedom could not exclude a particularly recalcitrant region, the Middle East. It is a notion that even today is widely met with skepticism and derision. Someday, however, as in the case of other global conflicts, we will look back and see that peace was not possible without victory, and freedom was victory's measure. Ronald Reagan was the father of moral clarity. He remains an inspiration for the road ahead.

Both of these men have been denounced as stupid or incompetent, or worse. Yet they understood something that their critics did not - that the quest for freedom of all people would invariably make America safer.