Bajíos y Honduras

Handy thing about being bilingual: double the puns.

"Honduras" means "depths," or "deep waters." All the more ironic, given the shallows ("bajíos") in which the thinking and coverage (such as it's been) of this country have languished.

When leftist President Manuel Zelaya defied the judgment of his country's supreme court and pushed for a referendum on changing the constitution to allow for the removal of term limits, it was a gambit right out of the Hugo Chavez playbook. The law of the land had been pronounced, and the Executive of those laws was choosing to ignore it. Further, when the head of the military refused to participate in distributing that referendum's ballots, Zelaya just up and fired him. None of this boded especially well for Zelaya's respect for democratic institutions, an opinion which was shared by the Honduran legislature, which voted to have Zelaya removed from office for violating the trust which had been placed in him by the Honduran people.

If the execution of that ouster was handled in a needlessly ham-handed and arguably itself illegal fashion (military personnel rousting the villain from bed and shuffling his pajama-clad carcass onto a plane for Costa Rica in the dead of night, ferchrissakes), this does not take away from the fact that the aforementioned military immediately handed power back to the civilian leadership. Further, that leadership has even offered to consider holding elections early, rather than declare some sort of "emergency" and clutch onto its newly-wrested power.

Some "coup."

Then we get Barack "I won't meddle in the affairs of other nations" Obama coming out, promptly and strongly, for the "restoration of democracy" in Honduras, and suspending aid until the power-grabbing Chavista in question is restored to his office...the one which the other branches of Honduran government had acted within their laws and declared him unfit to occupy. Naturally, then, the near-universal media consensus coalesced around the cries of Zelaya supporters demanding their guy back, drawing sickening parallels to the brutal oppression of demonstrators in Iran after the outright theft of the election there by theocratic thugs. Shortly thereafter the Organization of American States and the UN (those bastions of democratic ideals and justice around the globe) declared that Honduras will be on their mierda list until the status quo ante is restored. The government of Honduras just as promptly told these bodies to pound fine white sand. Gutsy move, that, since Honduras can scarcely afford to lose the aid, but the only one which preserves Honduran national sovereignty from erosions external and internal. And they seem to be putting their money where their mouth is.

As wrong-headed and dangerous as I perceive many policies of the Obama Administration to be, they have generally made a certain kind of sense to me. This one had me scratching my head. Why on earth would the POTUS see our nation as having a dog in this fight? It's not as if Zelaya exactly had clean hands in his purported championing of the downtrodden. The idea that this was some sort of tactic to curry favor with Chavez, ahead of some overture to come, seemed a bit too pat and partisan for my tastes (though I haven't ruled it out altogether). The whole "masked soldiers in the dead of night" thing rightly arouses discomfort, but every other aspect of the ouster struck just the right tone of lawfulness to get out most of the stain. So what gives?

It was this post from the Huffpo which brought it together for me:

A democratically elected president has been ousted by a military strongly supported and trained by the US government as apparent punishment for his adoption of progressive ideals. Where is the outrage, or at the least, the intrigue? Where are the solidarity movements?

Well, here are all the ingredients: mistrust of anything touched by the US military, check. Reflexive sympathy for even a transparently illegitimate regime, so long as it adheres to "Progressive," statist ideals, check. Concomitant repudiation of any government which lives even close to the center (let alone the Right), checkarooney. Throw in a dose of untenable moral equivalence, and the formula is complete.

Look, I get that Obama and his supporters believe in consolidating the business of a nation in the operations of its central government, rather than in the hurly-burly of free markets and federalism. I understand that there will tend to be a measure of sympathy for governments which operate along similar sets of values, and will even grant the good intentions of those who yearn for social justice (even as I recoil from the redistributionist policies which flow from those intentions).

But this is one which the Obama Administration has gotten flat-out dead Wrong. It is an epic fail, borne of the most superficial reading of a sloppy and unappealingly handled but ultimately lawful execution of a sovereign nation's governance. It can very defensibly be said to have been none of our business. However, if one were inclined to "meddle," then it should have been in the opposite direction. After all, as Krauthammer put it: "Whenever you find yourself on the side of Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and the Castro Twins, you ought to re-examine your assumptions."

Caucasus Belli (Part Two)

A little loopy on cold meds right now, so I beg the reader's forbearance for any graceless language which may emerge from the fog. Cooped up with me in the fuselage of that small jet this past week-end, it seems, was a virus with my name on it.

Last month, I wrote about Michael Totten's interview with two experts on Georgia, who convincingly argued that it was not Georgia which had struck first in South Ossetia, as is commonly believed. Instead, the contention is that it was Russia which had provoked a Georgian response, then used that response as the occasion to overrun and subdue its uppity neighbor to the south, and to thumb its nose at an international "community" which discovered --belatedly-- that it was powerless to do a thing about it.

In today's Examiner I found a piece in which the Georgian government has released recordings of intercepted phone calls from border guards near the mouth of the Roki Tunnel connecting Russian-controlled North and nominally Georgian South Ossetias.

The recordings released Tuesday, if authentic, will not cut through the fog of the final hours when escalating tensions burst into war. But President Mikhail Saakashvili hopes they will help dispel a dominant narrative that says his country was on the attack. He said they prove Russian tanks and troops entered South Ossetia many hours before Georgia began its offensive against separatist forces.

"Evidence in the form of telephone intercepts and information that we have from numerous eyewitnesses conclusively prove that Russian tanks and armored columns invaded our territory before the conflict began," Saakashvili told reporters.

Naturally, the Russians are bitterly disputing the authenticity of the recordings, and they may yet prove right to do so. Gods know, the situation in that part of the world does not lend itself to tidy narratives, and neither side can exactly claim objectivity.

Still, it is another data point among many which suggests that Putin's Russia is playing hard ball, and more than willing to exploit weaknesses where it sees them.

Witness also the willingness which the Kremlin has shown to align itself with even the most unhinged of Americas foes, and to play a very dangerous and short-sighted game of nuclear brinksmanship by proxy with the Mad Mullahs of Tehran. What emerges is a Russia which is calculating every opportunity to leverage whatever resources it can to thwart American interests abroad, and to position itself as a major player on the world stage. Using its energy resources as a strategic weapon, Moscow seeks to cement its ability to seduce and intimidate its potential competitors abroad, as well as its increasingly centralized and anti-democratic hegemony at home.

With a chilling mixture of guile and naked force, the neo-tsarist elites of Russia present a very serious challenge to the internationalist, soft-power orientation of the EU (and of leading Democrats here in the US). They are the bully on the global playground, and must be confronted accordingly.

Hugo's Little Friend

The ever-invaluable Doug Farah has posted on some very unnerving (if uncomfortably unsurprising) evidence of Hugo Chavez' regime's insidious collaboration with Hezbollah. In this case, two travel agencies operated by Hezbollah supporters based in Venezuela were designated by the Department of the Treasury as providing cover for the passage of Hezbollah operatives into and out of the South American nation.

This is only the tip of a very disturbing iceberg. It is still further evidence that those who scoff at the global nature of this Long War are engaged in a very perilous form of denial. In fact, the evidence is quite daunting that the Shia contingent of the Islamist threat, emanating from Ahmadinejad's Iran, is actively seeking to position assets behind our "lines," waiting to become activated, for example, should all diplomatic and economic options be exhausted against Tehran's nuclear ambitions, and a regrettable but essential military action ensue. These forces are finding all-too willing facilitators among the criminal organizations and malignantly anti-American regimes in the region.

So, when I hear of interdiction efforts like the above-linked, and about increasingly aggressive and successful operations against guerilla outfits like the FARC, I am heartened. In this global counterinsurgency effort in which we are engaged, it is vital that we deny our foes the footholds they seek in hostile and/or lawless regions...particularly those which lie on our side of the Montroe Doctrine line.

If nothing else, news such as this should prompt Western apologists for Hugo Chavez' increasingly hideous parody of a Workers' Paradise to take a good, hard look at their brow-ridged Bolivar. He is keeping some decidedly unsavory company.