Step one in making this a better world is to stop pretending that leaders who have distinguished themselves by destroying the livelihoods of their own nations, turning them into prison camps, and killing huge quantities of their own citizens, are just the same as the leaders of civilized countries.

The United Nations specializes in this sort of pretence, as witness the election of Libya to head the Human Rights Commission, a step that has been condemned even by human rights groups normally sympathetic to the U.N. This is only one of the reasons the U.N. is worthless.

Ronald Reagan was instrumental in bringing down the Soviet Union, and one of the first steps was cutting through the crap.

If you want to see what honesty about a regime is really worth, try talking to people living under or who have lived under those regimes. When they hear that some leader outside has recognized that they are actually oppressed and that their regime has been identified for the evil that it is, they gain at least a small amount of hope. When they see the leaders of the Free World treating their oppressor as though he had done nothing wrong, as though he was no different than the Prime Minister of England, there is no hope.